Playing Catchup (Listening to: Nitrogen Pink, Polly Scattergood)

It's been almost two months. This blog thing is hard to keep up. And it's not like I've been writing too much lately.

I have a lot of things to say now.

Family: It's a Thursday. My daddy says he wants to take me out to dinner. No reason, he just doesn't feel like cooking. We go to a tiny Chinese restaurant he's been eating at since the '70s. Order the usual. The new rules (or lack of rules) he says, are because he doesn't want me to have to lie. I nod. We're quiet. The food comes. "In the interest of full disclosure..." he says. "What?" I say.

My mama sits at her computer, typing numbers into boxes for fun. She doesn’t cook dinner anymore. Her cheekbones are highlighted with the blue gleam from the light of her monitor. She drags her heels with a tiredness she doesn't know how to shake. The gray beast of depression hangs over her shoulders like a worn-out sweater, lurks in the corners, shrouds her in a murky light.

“It’s just chemicals. She takes a pill,” my daddy says.
"Oh."
In the car on the way home, he starts talking. He never used to talk. What I know about our family has had to come from the simple knowledge living in my gut. What I know about my daddy's adoptive daddy's abuse. What I know about the fear in my mama and daddy's hearts, the sadness. But now, my daddy lays it all out. It makes sense, everything he says. It makes sense and it is not surprise. But that doesn't make hearing it any easier.

He carries the ring to the altar where his beautiful mama waits in a white dress, a glowing angel. She marries the man who will kick her son’s dog five dark years later. The man whose presence will hang over their house like a thundercloud. She hasn't stopped crying for the man she lost. It took years, and my daddy still ran into the arms of any man in khakis. Any man in a naval uniform. My daddy would hug his knees and cry, “Daddy!” His beautiful mama would stare at the pavement, unable to look into the stranger’s eyes. Embarrassed, alone. “Baby, it’s time to go. Leave the nice man alone.”

Windsurfing Boy and I started dating on Friday, March 13^th. For me, it was a very lucky day. Right now, he is on the senior bonding retreat. When he gets back (and when I return from college visits), we are going up to spend a week at his summer house on a nearby island. I have butterflies, but I cannot wait to spend some more one on one time with him. A few weeks ago, we played beer pong against Batman boy and a girl who graduated in ’07 and did advanced acting at our high school. Every time I see my boyfriend outside of school, Batman Boy is sort of lurking around. They are best friends, but it’s getting a little ridiculous. My Old Best Friend told me that as he was driving the carpool to school one day, Batman Boy’s hitting on other people’s girls came up. He said that if Batman Boy made a move on me, he would beat the shit out of him. This was before we were even officially together. Besides Batman Boy, everything with Windsurfing Boy is perfect. I visited him at work (the surf shop) and brought him lunch. He is the sweetest, most trustworthy guy I have ever known, and I usually fall for guys who are so bad for me. He thinks I’m beautiful and amazing. And he’s gorgeous too. How did I get this lucky?

Expelled Boy has started hitting on me. I can’t remember whether I’ve talked about this before. But I volunteered to help student government with our class t-shirts by designing the stencils. I stayed after in the art room, and he and my friend Cambridge were there too. He told me I had really pretty eyes. And he never shuts up about how I’ve “changed,” how I’m not the girl he remembers from last year. And on some level, he’s right. I’m not. I’m happy and I feel confident. I feel pretty, I feel special, I feel loved. He says he misses the Old Wendy. Well, Expelled Boy, Wendy doesn’t miss the Old Wendy. Wendy is happy to be happy. She is happy with her boyfriend and she is happy with feeling beautiful and talented every day. She doesn’t want to go back to loneliness, not for you, not for anyone.

Advanced Acting: I have been looking for a piece to use as my audition to be in the ensemble next year. I don't know if poetry is allowed, but I really want to do Daddy, by Sylvia Plath.

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time ----
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ----

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two ----
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

There's also a recording on youtube of Sylvia Plath reading it aloud. I have been practicing her accent and I pretty much have it down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM

Anyway, life is kind of a strange mix of delirious happiness and weird melancholy. Full disclosure can certainly be painful, even if you already knew the truth. Sometimes saying it out loud is what makes it real. And God, how good does it feel to be loved, to be wanted, to be talented and beautiful? Life is amazing and beautiful, if melancholy.

Fever (Listening to: Friday Night, Lily Allen)

I don't really know how to introduce this. I had a fever and I started writing, and here's what came out.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. And a character in my book says, as she reads, that the words don’t belong to her. They are and will always be the author’s. And she says all she wants with her life is to be something to somebody.

I feel like I’m recognizing myself. It makes me want to write and put myself on paper and make some other girl sigh out and moan me too to the moon and the small hours of the morning, and the blue Vaseline gleam of her face in the light of her computer screen.

Maybe finding yourself is like art. Maybe the negative space can be more important than the positive, the invisible defining the visible. And maybe if I focus on everything around me, I will know by default. Maybe I will be left with a hole shaped like my soul. Like how when you put a puzzle together you don’t know where the last piece goes until you don’t have anywhere else to put it. How all the other pieces tell you what shape you are.

It’s funny, any time I try to write about myself I end up a puzzle piece. Wondering why when I’m filled I still feel empty.

And lonely, I end up lonely. Every time.

They shouldn’t call it high. It wasn’t like that. Sure, my mind was up there with those fuzzy shapes in the ether wrapping itself like a lonely girl around these hazy truths. And it wasn’t thinking, really, it was like touching with my mind. Mental, emotional antennae. Touching, stroking those unimaginably immense, insane things all melting together in the car or bobbing around the ceiling of that smoky little room upstairs. With the window open and Hendrix talking to us. But high isn’t right. My mind was away, that’s all, but my body was so grounded and messy and sloppy and lonely all over the bed, drawn up in a bundle and splayed out for the world and Hendrix to see.

I want to surround myself with beauty. Beautiful things, beautiful people. Negative space, defining my inside by my outside and my surroundings. It’s what art is about. Interior equals exterior, unless it doesn’t. And you’ll know when you see it, unless you don’t.

I don’t know how to paint this.

I don’t feel like I know anything anymore. I don’t feel like I have anything in me worth expressing. I can only grab at those balloons bobbing around the smoky ceiling when I am full of weed and empty of everything else, and in the morning even those serene dreams have left me.

I end up lonely, every time.

My optimist pleads,

maybe you’re just hard to pin down, baby. maybe you’re just so complicated and tragic and sad and full of wafting inspiration that even you yourself don’t know how to explain it. Maybe you need to look to your negative space. maybe, sweet girl, no one is ever going to understand you because you’re more than what can be understood. and maybe we’re all like that, baby. maybe when it all comes down to it, we’re all shells that don’t start being filled for a long way down into the earth. and maybe humans, the people you see on the street, are a lot denser than you’d think. maybe there is so much packed inside each collection of limbs and features that it’s a miracle we haven’t sunken into the earth. and maybe that’s because the earth is even denser. and maybe everything in the universe is so incredibly dense and packed and full of thought and life and those bobbing balloons all melting different colors and your parents and your sister and the people you know are all sitting around wondering if they will ever be understood either, and, just like you, whether they even want to be. and honey, maybe you don’t know shit, but maybe nobody else does either. and maybe, baby, you’re going to realize this someday. maybe you’re going to be lying awake at night and it’s going to hit you, like that funny combination of letters that night when your stomach was sore with loneliness and the cyclops ceiling of the spare room in your grandmother’s house was watching you with that single, lonely eye. your life is going to mean what you believe it will mean. you will fall in love with who you let yourself fall in love with, and if you don’t loosen up and RELAX, nothing for you is ever going to work itself out.

because you never relax, baby. you never do. and it is so hard for us to see, locked up inside, dense and packed. and being carried around by boys with hands like men, and being touched with those big hands that don’t seem to change from one boy-man to the next, that won’t do you any good. sweetheart, it never will. and baby, you need to grow up. you need to love and hate. and feel things! baby, we swear you do. you hide in your room and in the park and inside your head. and even, lately, when you’ve acted, you’ve felt empty. and we know you felt different, that smoky night when you lay on that bed and felt the world pushing in around you, pushing itself on top of you, and the corners of the room rounding and your head so thick and your mouth nibbling and feeling and feeling so strongly. you used to like to drink, baby, and get out of your head. you used to like the release. but honey you were so empty! and that night, baby, you relaxed. it was a sweet, silent presence and we know you felt that. we know how feeling small comforts you, and how those big hands made you feel so safe because they dwarfed you. we know your life spun in circles around you. and it’s like you read, and they aren’t your words, but it’s like you read: The Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow together in the sea-green deep, and Now spins in circles on the surface. all melting together, spinning circles. and how reality is greater than the sum of its parts. He was right about that too. And they aren’t your words, baby girl, but that doesn’t make them wrong.

Portia (Listening to: Knee Deep at the National Pop League, Camera Obscura)

I am Portia.

Glinda isn't Portia. That's what really gets me. I definitely did not expect this. I am so happy, so excited, and so terrified. Batman Boy got Antonio, which he wanted, and Bassanio is this other senior guy who I don't know very well. We're getting lunch together tomorrow, to get to know each other better. So that rehearsing our kiss isn't as awkward. Oh, wow. I'm the female lead in the Advanced Acting play.

My American Studies final was this morning, and I still kind of want to puke. Well, there's nothing I can do about it now. During my study block, Expelled Boy came up to the library from biology and snuck up behind me to give me what turned out to be the most killer back massage of all time. We discussed the final, and I told him I'm Portia. We were in intermediate acting together last year so he was really excited for me. Damn, it's hard to get over him when he comes around rubbing my back and telling me I'm talented.

Almost as hard as it was when he told me I smelled good and put his arm around me. Almost as hard.


Well, damn. Today was weird. I felt like throwing up while being the happiest and proudest I have been in a long time.

Can you see me? I'm starting to glow.

Liar (Listening to: Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan)

Well look at that, I did make time to write.

I’m a virgin. I’m not stupid. I don’t want you to break my heart.

You said you’re a romantic. I guess I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t think you even know what that means, actually.

You cheated on the girl you said you loved. A lot of times. Look me in the eye, okay?

You like me too much to fuck me? Do you get how fucked up that is? You’re supposed to like the people you sleep with. More than like. If you are really a romantic I think you would know that.

Maybe the way you are works for you. It looks to me like it is working pretty damn well, actually. You get girls. You do. If that’s enough for you, then alright. Okay. There is nothing wrong with that.

But it is not romantic. You are not romantic. You’re afraid of romance.

Maybe you do love her. Maybe it’s the closest thing to love you’ve ever known. So what? Love does not equal romance. Especially not the way you love.

You’re a liar. You lie to her when you sleep with other girls. You lie to them when you don’t tell them about her. And you lie to yourself when you tell yourself that the things you do don’t stop you from being a romantic.

Look, you’re smart. You understand a lot of things I don’t. But I understand this and it looks like you can’t. You’re handsome and you’re talented. You’re kind, charismatic, and magnetic.

But I can’t trust you when you lie to everyone.

I got drunk last night off champagne with Salamander. She's been getting to know Expelled Boy better for a while now because they go out and smoke during break together. Apparently I came up for the first time when they talked a couple days ago, about who at our school they'd fuck.

And he said:

Yeah, the difference between Wendy and other girls is that I actually like Wendy. So I'd feel really bad, because I'd probably like...

Salamander:

Break her heart?

Him:

Yeah, you know.

Well I'm hungover and Expelled Boy likes me too much to fuck me. Where does that leave me? A weird place, that's for sure. To quote The Notwist, I feel like strange, boneless.

Salamander's friend came over. I think he was nice. We snuggled when I was full of warm champagne and empty of inhibitions. I remember talking in French, but I forget the words and meaning.

Also, according to Mike, Paul said I had the best female audition for the play. Also known as, I was the only one acting and not just reading. Also known as very good news. However, he still hasn't cast the show, but he's supposed to send out an email with the list this weekend. Also known as I'm busy refreshing my email every other minute.

All I want is to surprise everyone. Expelled Boy, Advanced Acting, Salamander.
I have a giant sun inside me and I just want to let it out.

Polite Ghosts Fading Quickly (Listening to: Half Asleep, School of Seven Bells)

The last three days have been an odd slew of lovely, contented sighs and tense pain.

On Saturday, I spent a large part of the day with The Expelled Boy. It's been over a year since I started liking him, and it's done: Almost forcibly spreading thinner 'til it dissolves completely.

Sunday, I blew off all my homework and just felt amazing all day. I slept in. Somehow I seemed to be lighter than air, giddy but in an entirely new way. Not in the love I felt for someone else, (The Expelled Boy, Art School Boy), but for the lack of that love. Being alone, and loving that feeling of independence, of self-reliance so much. I know that what begins as an unguarded train of thought, slowly can become an addiction to the slumber of disconnection and the resonance of memory that no longer has a shape but keeps you numb through the hours 'til gone is another day.

Monday started beautifully. I had this vibrating energy inside me and I was so much happier than I had been. Advanced Acting started after lunch. We sat in our own spots on the stage. Mike says to picture someone we love, the person we love the most of all.
I remember this exercise from last year. And I do not imagine the same person.
Last year I picked the girl I now know as Old Best Friend. Our friendship the way we knew it then has also almost forcibly spread thinner 'til it dissolved completely.
This year I imagine Laura, my little sister. When we were younger, when I was six and she was four, I would dream that she had died, that the overgrown rock garden in the corner of our yard where no one goes anymore had become a pond, a deep, dark lake of green scum and shadowy fish and that she had fallen from the balcony into its depths. I used to dream that I climbed down the chain hanging from the roof gutter that directed rain water, to try and carry her out of the lake. She would drown. The sky was always stormy. I would scream and cry in these dreams, and then our friends would peer out of the shadows of our dark house and giggle, laugh and say that they were happy she was dead. They would sing and dance and I would scream and bawl and wake up drenched in sweat.
Mike says picture this person I love most, and I imagine her. Now, he says, this person is dying. What do their eyes look like? What does their hair look like? You can comfort them. Where are you?
Just like that, I am crying.
Now, Mike says, they have one minute. When I call your name, you have one minute to say everything you want to say to them.

He calls my name first.

I need you to know that I love you more than anyone. I love you so much, so much, and I need you to stay with me. I know that life for you has been so much harder than it has been for me and I wanted to take that from you and protect you from that. I never could. I wish it was me. I wish I could die and not you, I do.
Fifteen seconds, Mike says.
I love you. You're going to be okay. It's going to be okay.
Ten seconds.
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.
Five.
I love you, I love you I love you I love youIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouLAURA.
And she's gone, Mike says.

Another name is called, but I keep crying, silently shaking and shivering and holding my empty hand tight around what I have convinced myself is her limp one. Those dark waters have swallowed her up again and there is nothing I can do.
As I walk from the theater to the bathroom, a senior from the class, Batman Boy, pats me on the back and says: Alice Cooper is a good look for you. And it's true, my cheeks are streaked with black mascara. I wipe it away.
The rest of the day my shoulders feel tense against my neck and I feel dragged through Hell. I take notes in Calculus for once. I can't laugh or make faces behind the teacher's back today.
That headache you get from crying hasn't faded yet.

Enough of Love (Listening to: Black Cadillacs, Modest Mouse)

Slip me some gum.

Have I got a secret for you.

Let me sing it to you.

Here is your hand on my thigh.

Look how your arms pen me in.

Riddle me this.

I’d give you everything

Myself

To know what you want when you kiss me.

Split my string of pearls.

Don’t you want to break me?

I am your disposable income.

You can be my impulse buy.

Mess me up, I’d like to tousle your hair.

Grab me, squeeze me,

But don’t you ever dare touch me.

Whispers?

I’ll kill you.

Love me?

Fuck that.

Bruise me, use me.

Tear me down.

Let me drink myself crazy.

Won’t you rough me around?

Abacus (Listening to: Horizons, Son, Ambulance)

Use me. Define me. Stencil me, if you can.

Count me on your abacus.

Why I never say hello, you know the answer.

I only wish you would tell me it.

It’s the bridge that I could never cross, even once I had arrived.

It’s the raspberries in my cheekbones and the chocolate I eat while I cry.

You always say I have the best food. (It’s me, it was always me.)

And I lied. I don’t cry anymore.

Break my teapot. Flesh me out.

My fingers have no thoughts these days.

Smashed eyelashes, my whispering belly.

Reeling in my first fish, tears as bait.

I don’t blame you.

I was beautiful.

Kissing clocks and the faces of our knees,

They never seemed so futile. (Chasing white rabbits was always enough.)

Gardens in the small of my back and bleak cities on my brow.

I just wonder why you won’t plant me a tree.

I could really use some oxygen right now.

Sing me the story, teach me the song.

About the way my toes'll curl under with someone else’s love.

The arrondissements and the sunflowers I know I’ll see alone.

Do people get tired of changing?

Do you believe in blank slates?

Tell me your thesis. (Oh, oh, your personal examples.)

Please win me over, I want to surrender.

I was never all that good with guns to start.

Crumple some paper, crinkle my bones.

Have my words all eloped in secret with you?

Curtains and couches and the fact that you won’t settle down.

What do you call a three and a half minute harmonica solo?

Knock me sideways and gnaw me near.

Kick me closer, force my flush.

I don’t want some pretentious, artificial gain.

Brush away my misconceptions. Tell me what remains.

Kiss The Clock, It's 11:11 (Listening to: Light Years Away, Mozella)

It probably won't be by the time I'm done writing this.
I haven't had time to write for weeks. School is basically eating my life et cetera and I'm too busy swooning over The Expelled Boy to write about swooning over him.
Wow, my life is so pathetic.

I thought I'd tell the entire world about it though.
First of all I'm in love with some new music, but I'll totally tell you about that later. Maybe I'll do a top whatever playlist sometime. That might be fun. Anyways, this song I have on repeat right now is an old favorite off my very first painting playlist freshman year.

Also known as two years ago, when the world was still black and white and oh so much easier.

I think I'm happier in color, even shades of grey.

But anyway, this song is beautiful. I've always loved it. It is just so mellow and the rhyming couplets are enchanting. Her voice is beautiful in an ugly-pretty way. I forget sometimes how much music has become a soudtrack to my life. Listening to it takes me right back to some of my first paintings, made in a few hours on the floor of my room with shitty brushes and my mini easel. The smell is...wow. Gotta love sense-memory.

I don't think I got this song back then. Back then I was so innocent; I had never had a boyfriend, a kiss, or even a hand to hold. I forget sometimes how much I wanted what I've had. It was worth it.

I'm remembering how long I spent crying over not being called by Art School Boy. The lyrics really fit that. I never realized it I guess. I was stuck on Tiny Vessels to get me through that crisis.

But:

Boy, looking back I see, I'm not the girl I used to be. When I lost my mind, it saved my life. But I don't blame you anymore, that's too much pain to store.
And I think I cried for days but that seems light years away.
And I'm never going back to who I was.
That life seems like light years away.

My head is so full of stories and things to say. It's totally jumbled.
Songs, my essay about myself, weekend spontaneity, LOVE, death, acting class
I wish I could share them all, right now.
I'll come back to them.


This is terrible blog. I'm pretty sure I'm breaking all the rules.

I Swear We're All Mental (Listening to: Hang Me Up to Dry, Cold War Kids)

Who I am is never going to be good enough for you. I think I get that now. I don’t know how you see me, and really it doesn't even matter. Because even if you thought I was beautiful, even if you thought I was perfect, it wouldn’t be enough. You and I will never happen. I just don’t fit in with the person you are trying so hard to be. I don’t know. Maybe that is you. Maybe you are a crude flirt whose laugh is just a little too loud. You know it sounds forced. To me at least. Maybe to everyone. It’s just a little too long. I’m being mean. But I can see right through you, you know. I don’t know, maybe we all can. I just feel like I know you, like I knew you, I mean. Like you are so much more than this stupid boy with so much wasted potential. A stupid sixteen year old boy. I’m not cool enough for him. I’d like to think I am, or that it is irrelevant and that if you care about me, he will forget his friends and the two of you can become one person. But it does matter. It’s all that matters. I know that. We all know that. I guess the duplicity never occurred to me before. But it was always there, even last year when I thought everything was perfect. You were perfect to me last year. In that one class. The rest of the day, it was like that 45 minutes, that hour and a half once a week, like it didn’t even exist. Only when you were alone could you smile at me, could you acknowledge me at all. I heard you changed. It’s pathetic. You are no different than then. You learned nothing. You are the same stupid fucking boy who bums smokes off strangers and gets caught for the stupidest little shit. I heard you went to rehab. Was that another waste of time? I can’t believe this. I hate you some of the time, I swear. I really, really do. Fuck. Let me tell you something. I was a little disappointed when I heard that you had given all that up, that you were smart and responsible. I wanted to be the one to change you. I wanted you to change for me. This is so messed up. I’m so messed up. God, you don’t even talk to me now. I feel like an idiot. We’re all idiots, aren’t we. Just stupid teenagers. Mentally fucking retarded, I swear.

The Expelled Boy Came Back (Listening to: Sukie in the Graveyard, Belle & Sebastian)

You saw me first, and came over to give me a hug and say hello. I haven’t seen you in months and that distance seems strung up between us like Christmas lights counting the days. My face bursts into a bright, blooming smile when I see you. I can’t quite catch my breath when you’re looking at me, and my heart is almost audible when we’re in the same room. I count the times you touch me. And now I’m sitting here without you, trying to figure out how to put what you do to me into words. It is impossible. It is inexpressible. I remember the things you used to say to me last year, how you seemed to hint at things I was too shy to acknowledge. And I’m still like that; I still bat my eyelashes because it’s hard for me to look right at you, right into your eyes. Somehow I can’t make that contact, and I can’t do more than smile and hug. Talk. Talking to you is hard for me too. I lose track of words when my heart is beating that fast. There are strange and terrible distances between us, a gap that cannot always be bridged, that tangle of twinkling lights. I see you watching me sometimes and it makes me flush, to know you see me too. To understand that you watch me, that you see me. Last year I told all my friends every little nuance of the way you spoke to me, every movement you made in my direction. I understand now that this is only ours, and maybe the milestones are for them, but the journey needs to be all our own. I don’t want to make a fool of myself. I don’t know how to say this. I did make a fool of myself last year, it was humiliating and heartbreaking to have it all taken away, all those words and little nothings I watched so carefully, all the time and all the glances in the halls, your smell. There was nothing I could do. I don’t want to throw myself out into that void, to tell all my friends about the way you looked at me today, to risk everything and bank on you being there when I know how quickly and completely it can all disappear. How one day you can just stop showing up. And it’s as simple as this: I’m falling for you. Please catch me.

That was two weeks ago. We barely speak. He doesn't touch me anymore. I missed seeing him around last year when he was kicked out. So now there's this recognition that we don't know each other anymore. That we maybe weren't made for each other. He asked me for my notes today. My heart skipped a beat.

I know you so much better than they do. I saw you open up, I saw all those walls come crumbling down. You're putting up that huge front again and I can see it, I can see you building it. You need to prove yourself to all of them again now I guess, and I understand that. Who we are is so much less important than who we show to the world in high school. And you don't want anyone to remember you for what you did wrong. For your very simple, very real mistakes. You want them to remember that loudness, that crudeness, that charisma.

It breaks my heart.

Because it was your vulnerability that made me love you last year. And that's clearly being buried more and more deeply as the days go by. There won't be any more hearts with bordering vowels on my notebooks drawn by you. To tell you the truth, I almost prefer it. I love organization, and I couldn't erase those doodles even though they drove me crazy. You won't hug me or joke with me or tell me how I smell amazing. Not this year. You won't cradle me in your arms, you won't act in sexually charged scenes with me. You won't open up. Your friends don't like me, I'm not cool enough for them. I don't do drugs. I don't party. We don't belong together. Seduce the foreign exchange student, I know that's the guy you want to be.

But please, I needed you. I know you, not like them. I've seen you, not the way they've seen you. I am different. You need to remember that.

I Guess I'll Tell You About Art School Boy (Listening to: "Come On Petunia", The Blow)

According to a friend (Salamander):

“Mostly, I'm kind of sorry for you. Maybe that's weird, but so much of you is wrapped in this boy who you only see once a year.”

I guess I’ll start before the beginning, because who I was before he happened to me is so different from what I have become.

I’ll be quick; this story has been told many times. It can get tiresome and I can get verbose. (Note: quotations like “this” are excerpts from writing I’ve done before.)

Freshman Year: I was quiet, with almost no friends outside The Group of ten or so girls who I’d been friends with since middle school. None of us had ever had a real boyfriend, and drugs and drinking were things we whispered about. I was every parents dream, and I didn’t really know then that something was missing. My friends all loved me, there was no real drama, I had a perfect 4.0, and back then I thought that was enough.

That summer I went back to a two week art school out of state. It was my third year, so I had a few friends there already. I was the only one of them who’d never had a boyfriend. I was the only one of them who was there mostly for the classes.

A few days in, a boy asked my friend Miss Mermaid to make out with him so he could beat his friend in a game of who could hook up with the most girls. She said no then, but by the 3^rd of July, they were sucking face under the fireworks.

Then he turned to me. And I told him no. He asked me why. I said I just didn’t want to. He started following me after classes, learning more about me, talking to me, being sweet, becoming my friend. He found out I’d never been kissed, and then things changed.

“I understand why now,” he said.

He was almost two years older than me, and he was a year ahead in school. He was even older in years. His sophomore year he’d been addicted to cocaine. He played drums. He was in a band. He wasn’t a virgin. I was completely overwhelmed by the situation, scared of him, scared of letting go, scared of something I still don’t understand.

At the dance, he kissed me on my cheek.

The next day he kissed my forehead and then my lips at the foot of the steps up to the girls’ dorms. The next day he asked me to be his girlfriend.

The rest of the two weeks, the most we ever did was kiss. He was sweet, he held my hand, he picked me up and spun me when he saw me. He was perfect.

When I flew back home, I wondered

“Can you define the final moment mathematically?

In a repeatable equation?”

Afterwards, he didn’t call. He didn’t talk to me at all, and I couldn’t figure out why. I missed him for months. I knew it was stupid, that we were a fling, but he was my first boyfriend, and I couldn’t just let go. I cried myself to sleep for weeks.

“Maybe you don’t understand who or what you were to me. Maybe you don’t see why what you’ve done is wrong.

I’ll tell you.

For three months, I had myself persuaded that you were the best thing to happen to me in my entire fucking life.

I remembered each specific moment of our parting, and I remembered when you said you’d call me.

You never did. I wasn’t worth a fucking phone call to you.”

And then I stopped worrying about it. I liked a different guy. I moved on. But then he sent me a note saying he missed me, and something in me exploded.

“What makes you think you can walk back into my life after you chose to leave it and tell me of all things that you fucking miss me?

If you missed me, you’d have called.”

I focused on who he’d been before he changed for me, on the boy who kissed girls for points. And that made it a little easier.

Sophomore year, I was focused on forgetting him. My friends resented me for talking about him, maybe even for having had that experience when so many of them were still trapped in how things were freshman year. They started talking about me when I wasn’t around. My best friend stopped being that to me after five years of perfect friendship. I made other friends. I pretended nothing was wrong, that we were all just growing up and that I didn’t care. I cried. I got drunk for the first time, for the second time, third time. And I wasn’t really happy then either, but I still thought it was better than freshman year.

This year, the summer after my sophomore year, I went back to art school. I knew I’d see him, and I dreaded it. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get back together with him. I couldn’t, not after he’d hurt me like he did. But a few days in, I found out something that changed my mind.

“The hardest and most lovely part of it for me is that you kept the pictures.”

And he had. The same black and white photos I’d hid in my drawer, he’d saved and carried back. I understood it. I could relate to it. I mean, I’d saved mine too. I think that scared me more than anything. But it changed my mind, and before long we were back together. And it was different that time, less pure, but somehow more real. It was tainted with that guilt and that hate and that fear and the eventual forgiveness that had been my life sophomore year.

I made up with my friends, but there is still that subtle undertone of fear and pain and love that was also my life sophomore year.

And I flew home again. Forgetting him was a lot easier the second time around. I don’t think I cried once.

I’m a different person now than I was before him. I don’t recognize the timid girl who didn’t know how to express what she felt, who was so reliant on such fickle people, who was so vulnerable and weak. And when I say I don’t know who I am yet, it’s because I know how much it can change, and how one event can shape a whole year of them.