Dear 11-Year-Old Ryan

Dear 11-year-old Ryan,

My name is Venice and I’m writing to you from the future. In case you don’t believe me let me say a few things. You’re allergic to mushrooms, you have a turtle shaped birthmark on your shoulder, and you get up five minutes early every morning to put your sheets in the hamper because of a certain kind of “accident.” Just kidding about that last one…no I’m not!!! We won’t meet for a few years, but I have a few things to tell you before we do. I’m writing to you as your wife of over 15 years. I know that must answer a few questions like, “Will I ever live to see 30?” “Will I ever get married?” The answer is yes and yes! I don’t really want to ruin your future too much, but as a 11 year old boy, what could I possibly talk about that you’d be interested in?

Okay, let’s talk about your future girlfriends.

In a few months you will have your first kiss.  You will be followed around the skating ring by a cute girl, and eventually, at the end of the night, kiss her. The next week you will find out she talked to another boy and when she walks up to you to give you a hug, you will scoot her out of the way without saying a word. In fact, you never talked to her again.

In the 7th grade, an Indian girl will have a crush on you. She and her friend will call your house and ask you why you are so mean to her or why you don’t like her, and even write letters saying the same. You will think she is very cute, but to everyone else in class she is seen as very clumsy.  Sadly, you will think she is nice and pretty, but because of race and because of her being known to be clumsy, you would rather be single than deal with your classmates wondering why you would date someone like her. You will never date her. At Christmas she will give everyone in class a lollipop and a small note. Your note will be super long. After you read the first few lines, you will ask your friend to see his note and it will be like, “It’s a good time to be happy!” (end note). You letter will start, “All year I really have been nice to you and don’t understand what I did to make you so… ” You will stop there and throw the note in the garbage. Don’t feel bad. You’re not the only one who has missed an opportunity to be happy because of peer pressure. Like the time when you were 4 and you had a crush on your neighbor, the one who everyone said you were boyfriend & girlfriend with. Yes, I know about that 🙂 I know that you played together every day and made mud pies, but after everyone teased you, you were purposely mean to her because you’d rather be “single” and not make mud pies than be teased for having a girlfriend. You really liked her but society made you hate her. I had a friend just like that when I was your age who I played with every day, got teased the same way too. And, like you, I was purposely mean. But what I did was knock him down as he was sitting on the trunk of his parents’ car and made him land on the car hitch. I walked away as he stood crying. Anyway, you will end up marrying a very dark Filipino woman to make up for your racism. You and I are cut from the same cloth, which is probably why we are drawn to each other.

Later that school year, your younger sister will hand you a note from one of her friends, a cute girl who lived pretty close to you. When you told me this, you said it was a situation where if you were smart and more horny, you could have turned this relationship into losing your virginity 8 years sooner than you did. You weren’t smart, I suppose, because as soon as your sister handed you the note and said who it was from, you ripped it up and gave it back to her and said, “Don’t ever give me a note from one of your friends again.” The girl was pretty and only a year younger than you, but because she brought your sister into it by giving her the note first, you just couldn’t be secret lovers. Your sister already knew too much and you’d rather be single than have your sister think you are attracted to some girl one year younger than her that rides your bus. Obviously, this is a trend here…and you apparently won’t be the most mature pre-teen. But you’ll be good as basketball, so that’s a plus! As far as that girl goes, you will never read her note because of your propensity to be a (future) hot-headed lover.

In the 8th grade you had a crush on a Puerto Rican girl. Perfect ass, like J-lo on a teenager. You will first start talking to her at the pool, she will be sitting on a table in her bathing suit with her towel around her. She will open her legs and because of where you are sitting on the bench below, you could see up her towel and see the crotch of her bathing suit. You will have a crush on her from this point, even though she will have been dating a guy for over a year and a half at that moment. After smooth talking her the best you can, you will offer to go on a date with her if she breaks up with her boyfriend. She will break up with him the next day.  You will then plan on going to the movies together. At this age, you will have moistened your boxers with froth multiple times because your horny ass will keep getting erections for no reason. At the movies you will try to touch her knee, and she will move your hand off. The next day, she will be babysitting and you will go over to watch TV with her. She will put a cover over the both of you. You will touch her legs and want to kiss her. You will lean in, but she will reject your kiss. She will say how she dated her last boyfriend for over a year and a half and never kissed him. So a whole week went by, a very long time for a guy your age, and again, you lean in for a kiss, and again she will turn you away. You will pretend to be mad and stand up to see if she feels sorry for you.  As you walk away she will call you back and say, “Come here,” and lean into kiss you. As soon as you feel her mouth open, you will pull away and stop. You will have no idea how to kiss, especially with a tongue. She will ask you what’s wrong, and you’ll played it off smooth like, “Nothing, I am saving the best for later.” However, the next day after the kiss, your mind will think you conquered her…because no way you were going to get sex from her.  Well, not in the next month, and that is just way too long to wait for a girl to put out at your age.

The next day, rather than her not wanting to kiss, she will drag you different places around the neighborhood just to kiss you more. She will be much more open and playful, because her kiss cherry has been popped. As you do this, she will be talking to you and will stick out her tongue at you like, “Ahhhhhhhh you know you like me.” You will notice that her tongue is all white…so white, that it’s yellow. You will be shocked and disgusted and think, “Oh, my God…I think I touched that with my tongue!” At the end of that day she will try to kiss you again, but you will turn your face. You will never kiss her again. All you will be able to thinkg about that night is her disgusting white tongue. I can’t blame you. Hairy tongue disease is real and very, very putrid.

The next day you will break up with her. She will cry and say how messed up it was for you to do that to her after she broke up with her year-long boyfriend for you. You will hear that she cried for days and won’t be sure why because you will feel like you barely know her. Girls are very sensitive. When you do break up with, tell her that it’s not her, it’s you. Tell her that you’re not ready for a relationship and that you still have some maturing to do before you commit to someone.  For the love of God, please do not mention her tongue to her, or that you are disgusted by her. Try to do one nice thing okay?

A few months later, you will see a girl at the gym. One of your friends will know where she lives. You will make a bet with that friend that you can get her to go out with you. He will tell you that she is a doctor’s daughter and doesn’t think she dates. That afternoon you both will go over to her house. You won’t think she is that pretty. She is cool, but she will be bigger than you. Not big as in fat, but just a bigger, taller person. Obviously because her father is a doctor, she either ate a lot of apples or took her vitamins each day. You will put your slick moves on her like, “You are super cute, how many guys have you turned down this summer?” Well, obviously she had never heard that type of game before so she will giggle and immediately fall for you. In fact, you will pop the big question: Do you want to go out with me? To both of you, this meant going steady, or being boyfriend and girlfriend. She said yes.

So you guys will “date” for maybe a total of an hour, because you will fool around a little bit and play touchy feely, but before you leave, you will let her know you really can’t go out with her. You’ll apologize for changing your mind, but you weren’t sure if you guys would really work. She will be kind of upset but since you barely know each other, it won’t be a big deal. A few months later, you will tell a new guy in the neighborhood about her, how she was kind of desperate for a boyfriend and he could probably see if she wanted to go out with him. They hit it off, had sex within a few weeks, and dated all throughout high school. Pretty cool that you helped him lose his virginity instead of your own. Oh Ryan, my little virgin rebel without a cause. You are definitely not a cock-blocker and you definitely don’t have a need to fight over a bitch, especially one that was never really yours to begin with.

Later, in 9th grade, you will date a girl for almost a year, although you will be repulsed by her after just a few months. You won’t have the heart to break up with her, so you instead you will try to figure out ways for her to break up with you. You quit talking on phone, avoid her at school, and will be so annoyed that you will eventually stay away from her as much as possible. As a side note, her best friend will break up with her own boyfriend who loved her like crazy, and totally change for his girlfriend. Everything he ever did bad, he changed and became whipped and the best boyfriend ever. Unfortunately for your girlfriend, she will take advice from her best friend and try to teach you the same lesson, or get you to be interested in her again. Little did she know, you have been waiting for her to break up with you for months. You will be so happy and relieved when she breaks up with you. For the rest of high school, she will write you love letters or apology letters. You never respond. However, in her yearbook as a sophomore, you will write, “Maybe one day when I am over the pain you caused me, we can reconnect and build something all over again. Maybe…..” Pretty twisted of you to write that because when you wrote it, you have no intention of getting back with her.  All the while you will stay single and not have to worry about being held down by a girl when all you want to do is play basketball with your friends. Mr Cool for sure. A virgin, but still, you could play basketball whenever you wanted!

As a junior in high school, you will move to a new location. Within a few days of school, a girl will call you. She will not be attractive to you, but she will still call and try to come over to pick you up or just hang out with you. You will eventually tell her you are not into white girls and that you like Asians, specifically Filipinos. She will be appalled and start saying things like, “How can you not date a white girl, you are white you know that right?” Good for you to standing your ground, even if it meant you will not get a little bootay from her. Eventually she will hate you because instead of telling her you didn’t want to talk with her, you purposely acted like a prick (do you see a trend here?) until she decides, on her own, to leave you alone.

Around this same time, you will meet another girl who you will say you love more than anything in the world, but you will never meet her.  I won’t talk too much about the internet because until you see it, you just won’t understand. Either way, you will meet this amazing girl, who you found out had red hair. Although you do not like red hair, her personality is so much like yours, you would never be so shallow that you ignore your possible soulmate just because she didn’t look like what you preferred.  You both decide that you are soulmates. When you talk to her on the phone, you love everything she thought about, talked about, and you won’t be able to wait until the day you meet her. And then…she sends you a photo of herself, along with some nudes.  It was at that moment you realize that not only are you an extremely shallow person, but you also shouldn’t be so quick to think someone is your soulmate just because you get along like you had been lovers and best friends your entire lives. You you realized that a soulmate must be hot as fuck and have a pretty vagina. This girl had neither, so apparently her soul unmated with yours. You will very slowly break it off with that girl who thought you were possibly her future husband. You will quit taking her calls and change your screen name online.

So why am I telling you all these things about you? Because despite all these moments with girls and females, you will be lonely, depressed, and at times even suicidal. You will feel like no one could ever love you, which is a bit confusing to me since you have turned everyone away that has ever tried. Someone will love you, and you will love her back with all your heart.  Just wait. If you can make it through those moments, you will find me.  You’ve always called me your Angel because I saved your life. Knowing all this stuff about you used to make me extremely jealous. I never knew why you talked to me about your past, but over the years I have realized you talk about everything with me. It wasn’t to brag or to show how much of a stud you were, but to share your life with me. And no matter how many of these moments before me you had, they were irrelevant to us now, us in the future. Then, I started liking these stories, because it meant that you chose me in the end and that there is nothing before you that can hold a candle to me. I’m glad you have them, I’m glad you can hold on to them. They make me smile when you speak semi-fondly about them. It just means that you will speak so much better about me. You know, when you talk to your next wife. It may be hard for you to remember because you’ll be 87-years-old when it happens. I plan on being with you until then. And by then, neither of you will be able to stay up past 7:30 p.m. and you’ll have to tell your stories in 5-minute increments. “When Venice and I first started dating, we were young. Long story short….” ZzzZzzz.  The next morning you’ll finish, “…now me and you are together.”

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