Last night I saw Ben D. for the first time since February of 2001. He did one of his vanishing acts but I caught up with again by email last week. He came over at 7.30 and drove us over to someone’s apartment in Logan Square where we watched a Palestinian film called “Thirst.” Ben is a volunteer for the Chicago Palestinian Film Festival and they are screening entries for next year’s festival. I brought along a bottle of my trusty El Gato Negro, which everyone raved about.

Ben and I dated during the summer of 1996. I was just starting to come out to my friends, and it was a very hot summer, and everything was full of stress. But I fell for him really hard. I was going to Columbia College and working at a Starbucks in the Loop near the Post Office and Ben was at the University of Chicago and working at the school library over the summer. He was on photocopy duty and his big project that summer was copying a huge 3-volume complete concordance of Emily Dickinson’s works. I met Ben after placing a personals ad in the Chicago Reader and he responded to it. Our first date was on a rainy evening; he met me at the Michigan building of the Art Institute across from the Museum, and we sat in the student lounge and ate cheese sandwiches I had made and drank hot tea from a thermos. We sat there and talked about Laurie Anderson and Jane Siberry and art and movies until the lounge closed, and then I walked him to the sidewalk. It was dark and rainy and we kissed goodbye under an awning outside. It was a perfect 10 on the Romantic Moments for Young People scale (I was 20).

I lived in Logan Square and Ben lived in Hyde Park. Pretty far apart, but we still saw each other a lot. There were a lot of sleepovers, and me getting up early to catch the bus to work, and me spending the weekend in Hyde Park. We’d get up in the morning while it was still cool out and go for bagels at Jacobs Bros. He did not drink coffee. One day we went to 2nd Hand Tunes and I bought a used copy of “After The Goldrush” by Neil Young on vinyl. Ben had to work at the library, so for the rest of the afternoon I just lay on his bed in the hot empty apartment and played the record over and over again.

Technically Ben was not my “first” boyfriend. But at the same time we were seeing each other I was freaking out over telling my friends I was gay; even though eventually all of them would come to be totally at ease with it, that summer everyone was as confused as I was. And Ben was in the middle of it. He was already out and comfortable with it.

He was 18. And when you are 18, and you go to the University of Chicago, and you live in Hyde Park, when the summer is over and class starts again you break up with whomever you were seeing over the summer. Especially when the person you were seeing writes a book-length travel diary called “Scenery” that contains some over-the-top romantic declarations.

So he broke up with me in September. It was so, so hard for me to get over it. And there were some weird emotional episodes I went through (which I won’t detail at the moment) that made it next to impossible for Ben and I to remain friends. Before long we had more or less gone our separate ways and weren’t in touch any more.

I went in and out of relationships until meeting Andy in March of 2000; I graduated from Columbia, went to London for 6 weeks, then back to Chicago, then moved to L.A. for 6 months, then back to Chicago; worked in the coffee trade and ended up at Intelligentsia. During this time (unbeknownst to me of course) Ben got together with an old flame of his who was a crackhead, and Ben started doing heroin, got hooked, dropped out of school, got wise and kicked, cleaned up, transferred to UIC, met his boyfriend Ali in 1999 (who he’s still with) and went through a million other things I haven’t heard about yet.

In October of 1999 I ran into him by chance at a rally for Matthew Shepard outside the 7-11 on Halsted. The next day we had tea at Kopi and went back to his place and had the obligatory reunion hookup and then after I left in the morning he vanished again.

When we met again in early 2001 we were both sadder and wiser to some degree. I guess I must have gotten in touch with him by email; there was a Jane Siberry concert coming up at the Old Town School of Folk Music and that made me think of him and I wanted to see the show together. To my surprise he wrote me back and said yes. And before the show we met at the Golden Apple on Lincoln.

He looked all grown up to me, and I guess I probably looked the same to him. It was shocking, but we were both … ADULTS. Here we were, both in serious relationships with at least some sort of measureable accomplishments in our past we could point to, and very faraway from that summer. The Jane Siberry show was marvelous. He drove me home and we kissed each other goodbye on the cheek.

I asked him to go with me to see Laurie Anderson a few months later, but he had plans that night. The show was on September 11, 2001. And we fell out of touch again until last week.

It’s always been important to me that there are people from my past who are still in my life, because I need them to be able to measure how I’ve changed. It creates a continuity. When left to its own devices, memory is just a jumbled mass of images and scenes without order or chronology. It’s hard to look back at things and make them all add up to something. Old friends make me whole. And they humble me, making me realize I’m just a small piece of something much bigger. I’m happy that Ben is still in my life, and I am glad that things are good in his own life. This Thanksgiving, I will be thankful for things such as these.