The "forbidden" love poem

I wrote these lines somewhere around 1979–1980, when I was 16–17 or so, to a girl that I so much wanted to be mine. We were a group of girls who always hung out together in high school, but I wanted this girl in particular all to myself. I felt that the other girls were in the way all the time and took far too much of her attention. I could just imagine how they pulled her farther and farther away from me. With time I became so jealous and desperate that I went so far as to write her a poem, which I discreetly handed over to her at one point. Never before or since I have done anything as silly, but my only excuse is that necessity knows no law.

A few days later some of our mutual friends suddenly turned up and waved my poem threateningly in my face. Their accusation came in angry voices: “It’s a love poem, you’ve written her a love poem!” At that time in northern Sweden it was obviously “forbidden” for a girl to write a love poem to another girl. Indeed the general atmosphere was upset and it seemed as if I was guilty of some sort of “terrible crime”. So “terrible” in fact that it was impossible even to speak about it and it became something unmentionable. I would never have guessed, what an effective “intimidation-potential” I have always possessed? Their reactions seemed exaggerated to me, but at the same time I have to admit that I sure didn’t laugh my head off, after all I found myself in a tricky situation. From then on my friends and the girl in question avoided me, and I myself pretended that nothing had happened, which was a sort of tradition of self-preservation and self-protection I guess. As a diversion I tried my best to look like something from the movie Taxi Driver: “You talkin’ to me, you talkin’ to me?” Well to be honest it may not seem in retrospect to have been the best way of dealing with the situation. Eventually we all moved to Stockholm and they went on hanging out with each other, but their disapproval of me seemed to survive almost anything? To tell you the truth, at this point I would say that it was mutual: I never really made any effort to get in touch with them either. I have no contact with any of them today – a common fate anyhow when you outgrow each other for whatever reason – except for the very object of my former jealousy. She and I really have nothing in common any more, if we ever had. However, now and then, every two years or so, I get in touch with her just to see how she is doing. I guess it is just one of those old habits that you continue doing but which no longer serves any actual purpose.