I was a sophomore in high school at the beginning of the school year in 2001. I had a handful of friends that I wasn't particularly close to. I wasn't a terribly engaged student. I spent my time listening to the Smashing Pumpkins and playing emulated videogames.

On the first day of school, I spent the entire day trying to get my schedule from an overburdened and overcrowded office since nobody in my family could be arsed to have kept track of when to pick that up in the summer.

While standing around with some of my hooligan friends I spotted the hottest girl I'd ever seen at that point. After a momentary bout of teenage lust, I carried on with my day, spotting her between classes very often and always noticing.

In freshman year, I spent a lot of time around the JROTC building on campus, but at the beginning of this year my friend Jeff insisted on us hanging with the goth and punk crowds. I was amicable to the idea for a moment or two until I realized this girl I'd seen was in JROTC and that motivated me to keep to my old haunts.

I eventually worked up the courage to talk to her one day. Her name was Steph, and I went home with a big smile on my face looking forward to seeing her tomorrow.

The next morning was a normal one. Mom made breakfast, Dad warmed up the car. I was sitting there getting my shoes tied when he came rushing back in through the door urging us to turn on the TV.

I had caught the movie, the Siege (1998) on TV a few days earlier, so Jihadi violence immediately came to mind when I was watching the Twin Towers burn. We watched the footage for a bit before heading off to school.

My Dad talked to me about Osama Bin Laden. There wasn't much information on what was going on by that point, but my Dad was certain Bin Laden had something to do with it.

Every TV in school was playing CNN. It was constant coverage. Even all of us, as ignorant shithead teenagers knew this was a big deal. There was a tension in the air that was broken by the excited cries of my friend Jeff, running through the crowd to find me.

"Stake, buddy! We're going to war!" He was like an excited child, like a little Captain Kirk. I was more pensive.

I wasn't the scholar I am now back then, but even I knew that something had changed in the air, and it felt dire. I'd suspected the conservative government was going to seek a reason to militarize the country, and this was the juiciest excuse that could ever be handed to them.

And while these thoughts paced through my head while Jeff danced around like a fool, glorious fantasies running through his head, I spotted Steph in the crowd. I waved and she waved back with a smile.

There wasn't much in terms of schoolwork done that day. Every class period was punctuated with the teachers stepping out of the classroom to go gossip with one of their colleagues leaving us responsible young adults to ruminate as much as we knew how to on these extraordinary events. I mostly sat and listened.

Anthony was strutting around with his girlfriend Joanna, no thoughts in his head about the day. He was always a bit of a goldfish, something I envy if I'm being earnest. We argued about some interpretation of Final Fantasy 7 or something else as inane as the towers collapsed on the TVs behind us they had set up in the cafeteria.

At the JROTC building, Steph was fixated on the tv. She was concerned government workers could be targeted, as her mom was a government worker herself. It wasn't my ideal meetup with her.

The last class of the day was honors English, and Mrs. Sahyoun insisted on us putting all that away and actually keeping to her schedule and analyzing some of the works of Mark Twain.

I wonder what he would have said of the absurdity of it all.

The days following were generally normal teenager days. Jeff's life returned to comparative mundaneness, Anthony and Joanna had a bunch of fairly public arguments. Steph and I became closer friends. My Dad kept watching the news obsessively, making dark predictions about the transformation of America that were not inaccurate in the long run. My Mom spun out in her various episodes that I was learning to ignore as best as I could.

By the end of September, Steph had accumulated a large number of suitors, of which I was not among. One was Alex, a senior who was into BDSM and extreme sarcasm. Another was Kenny, deaf in one ear but made of pure energy. There was Thomas, who she called Tumtum and had been her friend since middle school. There were others that I didn't know too well. They all formed a bit of a coterie around her.

She told them all maybe, and it was a common spectacle to see them brawling with each other outside the JROTC building here and there, while I stood and talked, making my quips and acting like I was somehow above it all. But we know better, don't we?

I was agonizing over it. Unable to say the words I wanted to say from half a lifetime of bottling my emotions and only letting them out in the form of easily deniable sarcasm and bizarre Dadaesque humor.

Jeff asked me if I liked her. He'd noticed the way I look at her. I confirmed the truth, and he bragged that he had given her his number. I was crushed, of course, but what could I do?

War rhetoric ramped up. Talks of national security were the norm at all hours on every TV I came in earshot of. My Dad continued monitoring it all between his increasingly desperate job search.

The very last weekend of September, Jeff comes by my house and asks to hang out. We go and sit around the baseball bleachers at the park nearby, him strumming on his guitar and bragging how Steph called him the night before. He was out, but he was confident in what it was about.

While I was internally folding in on myself, he casually mentions that he told Steph I liked her the moment I got off the bus the day before.

I flipped out. I spiraled into a panic. My emotions were too much, and I didn't need them broadcast to the world.

I laid in my bed that sunday night, listening to CNN blaring through the walls, panicking about how I might ever be able to be normal again. I'd see her the next day, and I knew that things would never be the same, and those stomach churning lullabies carried me off to a tumultuous sleep.

I tried to keep my breathing stable as my Dad took me to school the next day on the first day of October. As he listened to NPR talking about the hunt for Bin Laden and the beginning of operations in Afghanistan. I didn't dare let any of it out.

The transition from first to second period is where I knew I'd see her. I told myself things were normal, that it wasn't unusual to have an unrequited crush on someone. Things would be normal. She came up, accompanied by her entourage, and she passed by quickly while Alex took me aside with Anthony standing by my side.

He told me that Steph had asked him to talk to me. My stomach sank. I could feel the blood fade from my face. The beat between his words wasn't noticeable to anyone passing by but for me it was an eternity.

"Steph likes you. She wants to go out with you."

"What?" I wasn't sure I understood. Alex, himself heartbroken, let the words linger in the air. It turns out she'd called Jeff to see if he had my number to call me herself.

And then came an elation I have felt rarely since. I started dancing, literally, right then and there in the class transitioning crowd. Anthony was so happy for me that he started dancing as well.

Soon though, the elation gave way to more terror. What do I do now? I'll see her at lunch and I wasn't certain what was going to happen. The stomach churning gave way to shaking. TVs in some classrooms continued to blare the disintegration of the post-cold war hope we had all taken for granted.

I was taken by a maddening mixture of euphoria and panic. I was the dog who caught the car. How do I hold on, what do I do next?

Lunchtime took forever. And I walked myself down to the JROTC building. There she was outside the door, waiting for me. I walked up and asked if I could talk to her and she said yes and we started walking.

I clumsily stammered over my words. "So uh, do you, uh, want to like, uh, go to, uh, a movie sometime?"

And without missing a beat, she cheerily spit out "Actually I was going to ask if you wanted to come over and have dinner this Friday with my family?"

I was happy to agree to that. We walked around and talked. We both had the same favorite color, and we both liked Gundam Wing, and we both were fans of Final Fantasy, albeit we had only played different games.

I walked her home that day, getting off on a different bus stop than usual that was only a little farther from my house than my usual one. I met her friend Dean on the same walk, who introduced himself to me with a highly inappropriate cocaine joke and a complete refusal to make eye contact all tinged with a vague air of hostility. It didn't occur to me until many years later why he would be so passive aggressive toward me.

Her mother "coincidentally" drove up her car to meet me on the street with her, and was apparently satisfied that I was a fairly normal if unusually well spoken high schooler.

We sat on her porch and talked about whatever it is teenagers talk about. And she asked to kiss me. Our noses smushed together since we had no idea what we were doing. We laughed about it.

I told my parents I was dating someone, and they asked if she was Korean. I replied that she was Japanese, and they lost their shit. They spent several days convincing me how awful the Japanese were, citing every war crime they could think of, as if this was something to be laid at the feet of a 14 year old girl in Stockton, California.

Though it is interesting to note that Steph's great great grandfather was indeed one of the generals responsible for the Korean occupation. Still not something she should have to bear.

After dinner, her mother and sister (also named Steph), met my parents. And my parents let their animosity fade upon seeing they were a fairly normal family like anyone else, and weren't racial supremacists as had been previously posited.

In the next months, the war in Afghanistan started. Steph advanced in JROTC and became one of their star cadets. Anthony and Joanna fought more and began a period of separation. Jeff moved on to Tandy, a really cool skater chick. Alex and Kenny began to pick fights with me, which I ignored. One day, Kenny had a freak out at Steph and I asked him to keep his distance from her.

My parents continued to occasionally flip out about Steph and try to convince me now and again to break up with her. One night my Mom's episodes got bad enough that the fighting escalated into physical violence with my Dad. She was forced onto medication soon after which calmed her immensely, and my Dad decided to just let me do whatever I pleased as a form of emotional hostility.

New Years came, and Steph's mom caught us messing around in her kitchen. In hindsight, it wasn't a big deal, but the stern lecture I received caused me to faint. My Dad used this as an excuse to advocate heavily for abstinence to me, choosing to go the route of instilling shame in me of my urges. I only learned after he died that he gave completely different advice to my brother and had lived a fairly slutty lifestyle himself as a teenager.

Things were strained as I was bound by terror in being with Steph physically. Her sister was sent to watch us, but I was able to distract her by letting her play Diablo 2 on my computer while we messed around in the next room in front of the TV detailing the invasion of Afghanistan, all the while I was skirting panic attacks.

My Mom's temper cooled in these days. The medication kept her calm, and I actually found myself feeling less terror in general. February came, and I made a critical error in speaking the opinion that Valentine's Day was a fake holiday. This of course caused great emotional upset in Steph, who had a very public tearful breakdown.

I apologized profusely. I got her candy, I even participated in this stupid fake high school marriage ceremony they were doing and wore a dumb plastic ring. She was over the moon.

I would often take off the ring to stim with it, and I was especially fond of spinning the ring on my desk. One day, I did it wrong and it flew off toward the girl sitting in front of me and rolled down her back into a gap in her pants. I briefly entertained asking her to look for it but even I realized how bad of an idea that would be, and I decided to just tell Steph I lost it down the sink near my desk. She was heartbroken.

It colored everything for the biggest event of the year. No, not prom. Prom was something for everyone else at Edison High, not for us. Our little group of ignorantly neurodivergent white kids were instead gearing up for the Military Ball, the big dance between the JROTC classes at all the local high schools.

I wore a suit for the first time, Steph wore an amazingly cute cocktail dress. I brought her a corsage that my Dad insisted I would never be able to put on myself, so I should ask her mom to do it. She broke the pin almost immediately. My Dad whispered into my ear that I would not have gotten that far, but I think he probably realized how dumb he had been.

That night we arrived as kings and queens. We mocked the cadets from the other high schools, and danced to the Bloodhound Gang. As the evening wore on though, the cracks began to show. Anthony and Joanna had a big fight, Jeff and Tandy had a big fight, and so did Steph and I. I found myself fighting a panic attack as I fired back with my own irrationality. I don't even remember what we were fighting about.

The night ended with us in a sour mood, being driven home without speaking to one another.

Jeff and Tandy broke up soon after. And Jeff dropped out. Joanna started dating Corey, which everyone but Anthony seemed to be aware of. Steph and I fought a lot, but we stayed together.

The school year ended soon after, and soon after that, Steph went on a two week vacation to Okinawa to visit her family.

I was so very lost and lonely without her. I found myself staring at the TV, watching footage of bombs and American Exceptionalism splayed across the world. I watched Freedom Fries come into vogue. I watched anti-Iraqi sentiment dredged up. I watched a bloodthirsty country get thirstier.

And then Steph knocked on my door a day early and she leaped on me with a kiss. Her mom had lifted the requirement of having her sister around, and my parents were gone, so we spent the afternoon alone together for the first time.

I was so in love. The way only a teenager can be. Feeling her close to me as the world ramped up for unending war, it felt like it was the only thing that mattered, listening to her heartbeat.

"Your heart is beating so fast." I noted.

"It's because I'm happy." She beamed.

I think I let myself be happy then, too.

The new school year would be upon us soon. We'd step onto the grounds hand in hand, and meet our friends. Military recruiters would start arriving in droves, convincing each of us to contribute to the unending war machine.

I'd observe the new class of JROTC cadets marching across the campus. Steph had left JROTC to spend more time with me, and I'd started taking classes at the community college feeling like maybe there was some point to this whole academics thing.

With her hand in my hand, we two millennials ignored the world burning down at the hands of the American Idiot. It wouldn't last forever, but at that moment, happy endings didn't have to.

Stephanie and I stayed together for as long as we could, before we'd be torn apart by my parents' economic and mental instability and I'd find myself walking the lonely path of finding my soul.

Jeff joined the National Guard and served several tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq as a Blackhawk door gunner. He has a couple kids, and was in a really kick ass rock band.

I was the best man at Anthony's wedding to Claire in 2008. His uncle left him a cabin in Lake Tahoe that he rents out and generally lives his days coasting and being a good father to his children. I don't text him as much as I should.

Alex lived in San Francisco for a long time working for the airport before moving to Louisiana so his girlfriend could do grad school.

Steph and I spoke now and again. My emotional instability made being friends with me difficult, but we eventually forgave each other the pain of adolescence. Steph married a guy in Phoenix, Arizona, and had a kid. The last time we spoke was right before I moved to Ohio. Some mutual friends tell me she's doing alright, if not completely ideal.

I think about her a lot. I wonder how she's navigating the perils of modern America. I hope she's happy, as happy as she was on that sunny afternoon so very long ago.

And as for me, well that's a story in progress. I suppose it is for all of them too. For all of us. For America, even.

There's a big piece of my heart that remains back then. Filled with love and surrounded by war, a kiss exchanged between two fools who weren't brave enough to win, but could at least love each other for a moment.

A moment long enough to live.