When I was a teenager I was horribly depressed. I think I have mentioned this before, not that you have been keeping notes or anything. But it was an awful time.

I was living with my mother in this totally isolated, fucked up town. I was in love with a boy who didn't love me back. I missed my family, my home, my real friends who were back in the town I had grown up in. I was stuck in this terrible place and I felt so completely alone.

Unrequited adolescent love is vicious. My best friend was also my crush. We spoke on the phone every night for hours. We spent every waking moment together. I wrote mountains of poetry trying to describe the feelings I had for him. As it became more and more clear that he wasn't interested in me "that way" I began the downward spiral. He accused me of being in love with him and my heart broke. My friends no longer mattered.

Of my entire young life, that year I remember most vividly. I remember how I stopped eating, surviving on granny smith apples and coca cola. I remember sitting in biology class crying, writing sad notes in my journal about how much I wanted to die. I remember sitting in my room, listening to the cure and pink floyd VERY loudly and writing long agonizing journal entries about how much I wanted to die, alternating with entries about how much I loved that boy.

People noticed my depression, but didn't do anything about it. My mother was completely oblivious, of course. My best friend- that boy- would sit with me on the phone late into the night begging me to promise that I would be at school the next day. Begging me not to kill myself that night.

The night before the last day of school I had a dream about it. I dreamed that this other boy I knew saved my life. When I woke up I felt light for just a moment, before i remembered that my problems still existed. I wrote about it in my diary. It wasn't completely out of the blue- I had just heard from another friend that this boy had tried to kill himself several years before. I barely knew this boy, but he became the boy who saved me in my dream.

That night I went to a beach bonfire party to celebrate my friends' graduation. The boy who saved me in my dream was there, trying to make it with some girl visiting the boy of my crush. She was a complete stranger from Sacramento. The boy who saved me had volunteered to drive me home that night before he had set his sights on the girl from sacramento. So I waited for them to do their thing in the dunes. I sat by the fire and cried. Other friend sat with me, but it's hard to be celebratory when you are trying to comfort a black little cloud. Everyone drifted off and I tended the fire. The boy I was in love with had disappeared early in the evening with a friend of the girl from sacramento, and I never saw him again that night. Eventually the boy who saved me returned and told me he would drive me home. He and his love interest and I packed into the cab of his little truck and we left the beach.

Halfway to my home I told the boy who saved me that I had dreamed about him the night before.

"Oh really? What did you dream?" he said, interested.

"I dreamed I was going to kill myself and you saved my life."

he stopped the car.

I was crying.

he drove me the rest of the way home.

we sat in my driveway for an hour, the boy who saved me, the girl from sacramento and me, smooshed in his truck. I was crying, he was stretching to hold my hand and she was squished between us, trying to think invisible thoughts.

"That's a permanent solution to a temporary problem" he said. "Don't worry about that boy you like- he's just a stupid kid. He doesn't know what he wants. Don't be as stupid as he's being."

The boy who saved me became the boy who saved me. He sat with me, freezing, on my front porch for hours while the invisible girl sat in the car waiting for him. He talked me down. Then I went inside and went to sleep, feeling magically light again.

Later on that summer the boy who had been my crush was crushed himself when I told him I didn't want to hang out with him anymore. I ended our friendship when I realized just how stupid I had been for so long. He was just another boy. He smashed a cup of coffee on the dashboard of my car, slammed the door shut and that was the last I spoke to him for a year. It was a little shocking, but at least I wasn't depressed anymore.

I wrote all of this to say that I am not like that fifteen year old girl. We're the same person, but I learned a lot from her. I never saw the boy who saved me again, but I have written a million thank you letters to him in my mind. No matter how bad things may get now, it will never be like it was that spring when I was fifteen.