Those moments in movies, the incredibly sappy ‘this is the second in time I realized you are all that I ever wanted as it pours rain outside while the portent of a thousand tomorrows looms but what the hell, we’re happy right now and that’s what counts,’ you know, THOSE moments, they have to come from somewhere, I guess. You can’t make up some of the things that you’re going to live in this life, and therein lies my tale.If you look back to 1996, you’ll see me, a freshman in college, hundreds of miles from home in a desolate place commonly referred to as Omaha. A shy, eighteen-year-old boy (who has no idea what he’s doing) tells his parents goodbye as his mother hands him a toaster and tries not to cry. Once said toaster is safely installed in his room (that is, tossed under the bed until midway through second semester, when he will remember he has a way to toast Pop-Tarts after all), he explores the campus. He wanders along the cobblestones that speckle the mall, through the gardens behind the administrative building, and past the buildings that will teach him all he needs to know about life. Or so he thinks.

But, being a geek above all, he ends up in a computer lab, where he is taught the wonders of the internet by his new friends, the other geeks from the second floor. Wow, it only takes three minutes to load a page here? This internet is fast, yo! Ah, 1996, how I miss ye.

Sitting at one of the ergonomic chairs and reading more than he had ever previously known about Star Wars, despite years of intense study, he doesn’t expect to meet her. You know, her. The girl in the overalls, the one with the strawberry blonde hair whose smile might actually be able to crack a stone if she gave it enough concentration. And he certainly doesn’t expect her to approach him, the shy boy who hadn’t been able to say much to girls in high school beyond mild grunts with the chance of occasional thick swallows. Who is this strange girl? More to the point, why him?

But so it goes, so it goes. Girl has a boyfriend back home, so the boy is able to try to put it out of his mind, and allows himself to be friends with this girl, albeit friends with a flirtatious undertone.

Then, one night, after the two a.m. phone call to talk, it’s time to Lloyd Dobler-up and tell her what he really feels, and she listens with shining tears in her eyes and thanks him, even though she doesn’t reciprocate. Does this discourage the boy, this shy boy who has discovered a boldness that he didn’t know he had? Of course not, because this is college, where every moment is Romeo and Juliet, mixed with the occasional anthropology class. Letters, looks, glances, everything means something, and he never gives up, never gives in. The girl breaks up with her boyfriend, and right before the boy and girl leave for a fall break, there is whispered conversation that turns into more than conversation, and to this day, it’s hard for the boy to remember lips that tasted so sweet as hers those first few times, blah, blah, blah, first loveisms.

Feel free to vomit any time now, because it only gets worse.

They return to school and now, they’re a couple, the first of the boy’s life. There are letters, notes, mix tapes, getting caught on the girl’s floor after hours when a fire alarm goes off, you know, all the usual things. The boy loves her, and he knows it, and he says it. But she won’t say it back. She doesn’t want to hurt him, and she isn’t sure yet. But still it goes on, and then… Christmas.

Everyone is heading for home for a month, and this is the moment, because this is when the girl takes the boy by the hand and leads him into her room, being grave and serious and scaring the boy, because he knows he’s screwed up, that he’s messed something up big time, and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and this is where the music would start to swell.

“I love you” are the words she says simply, so simply, as she presses play on the stereo, and then the song plays – “Head Over Feet” by Alanis Morissette; it’s surrender, finally, to loving him, and it’s all of a sudden too hard to breathe for the boy, because he knows no matter how many movies he watches, no matter how many stories he may write, he cannot capture this most perfect moment in time in his life, not in words that will bring what he is feeling out for the world to really understand, that the song may be cheesy, that the lyrics are maddeningly dead on, that it’s all just so… right.

And for the next three years, the boy and girl make a relationship, supporting each other through school, work, and all the little storms that life tends to rain down on people who have the gall to be happy. After they break up, mostly because it was time, somewhat because the boy was kind of a jackass who had a lot of very confusing feelings about where his life was going, he remembers hearing that song again, hearing Alanis warble her tune of love, of capitulation to someone who simply wouldn’t take no for an answer, and he realized that she was going to be tied to him forever, his first love, and the first love is needed so you can find the right love with the lessons from the first. Or something. Maybe he was just depressed.

Either way, it’s been ten years since the girl in the overalls with the strawberry blonde hair played that song for me as I held her, and I’ve been lucky enough to love again, just as deeply, but differently; the first time, the sweetest time, that part of my heart is reserved for that girl and that song, the one song I keep deleting from my iPod knowing I’m only going to add it again, the one song that has the ability to simply and completely wreck me.