Love, Life, and Loose Ends (Listening to: Yayo, Lizzy Grant)

Writing from a few weeks ago:

In a dream I saw myself on the floor of a cathedral. Beams of golden light, dancing with dust. A ceiling so high it seemed vaulted with stars. I was just waking up. Lying, in that half dream state where the world spins around you to a haunted cotton candy melody. Duvets and comforters and fine cotton, pleated and pulled around me like a bird’s nest. Each tuck dotted with a tiny jewel. And the ceiling is so high and so far away…
I like feeling small. And sleep-walking among redwoods or the trunks of pillars makes me feel safe. Echoes, rings of high heels on marble floors bouncing back to me from the lofty ceiling. A small noise when it returns to me.
And looking up at people. Tipping my head back, feeling my hair graze my back. I like that too.
And dresses that make me feel dainty and delicate. Fine-boned, slim, tender. Stepping along the broad bare shoulders of the dusty highway with the sunlight fingering my own bare shoulders. Being passed from one set of giant’s hands to another. A small bird, fragile, wings folded.
And the black beast of night pushing in around me. The hungry dark, gobbling at my footsteps, nibbling at my neck, biting my earlobes. Climbing on top of me, rolling over me in waves, pressing the air from my lungs. Hugging my body like an ebony glove over ivory fingers. I like that too.
And there are times when plucking dandelions from the interstate median sounds beautiful to me. Times when I am almost willing to throw all my principles away for one clouded night and one boy who tells me I am lovely. There are times I want to be passed around the circle like a pipe, smoked and passed along again. When I like to feel used up, beaten down, and trampled underfoot. Some forgotten blue forget-me-not with a little yellow center.
I’ve been asked who it is I want to be. I want to be sheltered. By starry ceilings and comforters and tree trunks, by tall boys and the terrible tangling dark. I want to never have to be alone.

Salamander's Response:

With the beams of golden light - SO you. It reminds me of something else you wrote, talking about bubbles of light... I think you were talking about your room in that one, I might have to look it up. Your writing a lot of times goes back and forth between stuff that's amazing because I feel it and stuff that's amazing because it's so pure you, and Wendy is beautiful and so is Wendy In Words.
With the vaulted ceiling, it's like pure dream state. Amazing and you. And little feelings, like looking up at people...I like you in dresses that make you dainty and delicate. I like you beautiful, small, held in hands rougher than yours. I don't know. Something soft and infinitely intricate that needs your hands cupped to hold it from falling into the breeze. It's not that I like you weak, it's that I like seeing you cherished.
The night? That is you, perhaps, but a part of you I barely know, and it's not there in me. I love the night and hate the dark. Love screaming but deep down know it's just because I hate the silence. Night for me isn't about dark, it's about the light and noise that people create to get themselves away from the blackness that goes on forever.
And "I want to be sheltered" is probably the biggest thing I identify with. "By starry ceilings and comforters and tree trunks, by tall boys and the terrible tangling dark" is just beautiful. Like you. It fits.

Valentines Day is Saturday. And for the first time in my life I might have a Valentine.
Winter Ball: In the car he tells me I look gorgeous. We accidentally order the same thing at dinner. We dance all night. I get drunk at a party at his house and he smokes a joint with his buds. "Wendy, do you like Windsurfing Boy? Good. Because he fucking loves you. You need to hook up. There is his room. Do you understand? Good."
It didn't happen. He was too much of a gentleman. He drove me to my friend's house for the night, and at 2:30am Sunday morning he kissed me in the middle of the dark street. "I should go," I say. "But I don't want to." So we kiss again. "I really have to go....okay one more." And again. "You have to go," he says, and sends me off to a floating drunken climb up concrete steps to my friend's house.
"He was telling me he wants to ask you out but he is too nervous," is what I'm hearing all the time now.

He is leaving for Sun Valley on Saturday and I am leaving Sunday for Hawaii. People tell me they will keep an eye on him for me. We aren't dating, officially, but we might as well be. We are getting lunch on Thursday and Friday and I cannot wait to see what happens next.
Merchant of Venice closed this last Saturday night. He came on Thursday, opening night, and told me I looked beautiful and was amazing. He won't stop telling me and he says he's making me a mix cd.

On the downside, Batman Boy has started hitting on me. He grabbed my ass before the curtain call, and I didn't have time to slap him. He flirts with me and Windsurfing Boy is pissed at him for all the flirting, because apparently it's typical of Batman Boy.
But I don't even care. Life is too wonderful and it snowed yesterday night and the world was white and I am so happy these days.

Weekend (Listening to: Hometown Glory, Adele)

I'm in kind of a weird mood.
Salamander's boyfriend (they're in an open relationship) has been hitting on me. And the attention is nice, and he's a nice enough person I guess, and I suppose he has a great body, but he sort of creeps me out. He's hooked up with the majority of my friends, for one, and for another, the whole open relationship thing kind of freaks me out. My Alaskan friend who stayed with me over break hooked up with him, my friend who went to Germany hooked up with him, and Carmen San Diego has also. Along with a long list of girls and boys (According to Salamander he's probably not bisexual, but just horny) I don't know and will probably never meet. Did I mention he and Salamander had sex for the first time less than a week ago?
Anyways, the one rule Salamander has with him is no sex with other people. Anything but is fine. And sex is defined as intercourse, anal and oral are a-okay. Which freaks me out more.
I've only met him two or three times, and already he seems to be targeting me as his next catch. When we were high on New Years, my Alaskan friend and my other friend and I were lying in his bed in his dad's house (his dad wasn't home), and he was sort of making the rounds as the "communal boyfriend." I can't remember for sure but I'm pretty sure he felt me up.
A brief history:
1. Beginning of summer kick-off barbecue: he makes an appearance. Salamander and he discuss the rankings of all the girls present in ranks of attractiveness. Wendy is placed number one, according to Salamander and the Communal Boyfriend (I guess we can just call him that now).
2. New Years: He spends all night either hooking up with my Alaskan friend (We can call her Forty Cows, I can explain why later...she's not obese or anything) or telling Wendy she is "heartbreakingly adorable", telling her her eyes look sad, touching her face, ears and nose, or feeling her up in other less pg manners. Wendy is high out of her mind and doesn't really see a problem.
3. Last Night: volunteers for a photo shoot Carmen is doing of Wendy, (Wendy and Art School Boy broke the ice with a romantic photo shoot at art school), and suggests Wendy and he hang out sometime one on one after crew.

Oh that's some other news, I went to National Portfolio day today with Carmen and my other friend, Jewel (who has also hooked up several times with Communal Boyfriend, coincidentally), and Carmen had some pictures from a photo shoot she did with me at the beginning of the school year. I had to leave early to make it to the memorial service for a girl from my grade I knew who died over break, but according to Carmen there were some rave reviews about my modeling in her photos. One college rep asked if the girl in the pictures acted, because there was phenomenal depth to her expressions, and said that I had the perfect model's body and insisted that Carmen use me again. All the reps said that a few of her photos could be high fashion photography.
So Carmen and I were brainstorming photo shoot ideas last night, and Communal Boyfriend got wind and said: I'm first in line if you need a boy.
Which Carmen took him up on.
Which means I may have to kiss him.
Which may give him the wrong idea.

I wish we had another option.
I wish I weren't so lonely. It would make this an easier decision.

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.

Dirty Golden (Listening to: Mouth Full of Bones, Natalie Portman's Shaved Head)

Little pieces keep coming back. They float in and out of my head. Impermanent, detached fragments of a foreign person, weaving in and out. Fingers on my earlobes, hands on my body. Palm to my face. Words, strings of crepe paper words fluttering just out of reach. Time spreading over me so quickly. Losing track of hours, wrapped up in dreams I can’t describe, mysteries I no longer understand. Lonely, needing love so badly. Aching for contact. Please just touch me. Make a mummy of crepe paper words, tell me I’m beautiful. Tell me anything. Stories about a girl like myself with a beautiful soul. I like that you think my eyes look sad. Kissing a finger quickly, thinking it’s a bite. Trying not to laugh, so very immeasurably floatingly sad. Forgetting to breathe. Losing track of the inhale exhale rhythm. And time running over me like water. Feeling dirty and messy and so warm and comfortable and uninhibited. Sloppy and so lonely. Begging for love like a dog for a treat. Wanting to be patted on the head and told good girl. Fingertips on my nose, my whole body following. And music, bathing me golden. Dirty golden lonely liquid touching. And that swimming pool longing for it. I want to go back.

White Flowers (Listening to: A Dustland Fairytale, The Killers)

I don’t really know what to say. Maybe I’ve lost sight of words. They haven’t come as easily lately.

I don’t want to regret anything that has happened.
I’ve got a box of treasures in my room. Pictures of my sister. Folded paper from my first boyfriend. Airplane tickets and the broken pieces of an old pearl necklace. It’s a trunk for doll clothes from the fifties. It was my mother’s. Dusty white with red trim. Brass corners and rivets. So very dusty.
I get tired. I am tired all the time. And I don’t really know what that’s about.
Maybe I’ve been focusing for so long on what’s inside that trunk that I’ve lost sight of the trunk itself. Maybe I was worried over details and I forgot about my life. The big picture. I feel like I don’t really know anything anymore.
I know I’m not who I was. I know I’ve changed. And I don’t know whether I am not myself or whether who I am is changing. I don’t know whether to push ahead or turn back, tail between my legs.
I know it’s a pattern I should recognize. Innocence is always corrupted. Good girls never last. They never do. And being good never really did me any good, did it? Maybe I’ll be better off.
I see it as white flowers. Dusty snowy petals scattered in that trunk. And lately they’ve withered so quickly. Dried up. It happened so quickly. And I know it always does, and that that’s no excuse.
I never used to do things. And now I find myself doing things when my body is not my own and seeing things happen that I don’t want and don’t not want and I don’t know what to think. Before when I wasn’t sure, I’d do nothing. Hole up in my own head. Get tied up in thoughts until the moment for action passed. I’m acting and I know they’ll tell me that’s better. Action. Doing instead of thinking. Empowering. But I sometimes feel like, with this little nagging doubt, like I just wasn’t looking ahead. The girl I know would never do these things.
I am not that girl these days. I don’t know what caused it. And it’s fun now. Parts of it are really fun. The not caring, the recklessness. The recklessness I never would have done before. But I’m scared I’ll find out too late that those dirty white petals were my soul, my real and actual soul, and that when I realize it, they’ll be gone. Only dust.
My pearl necklaces break, one by one. My first boyfriend broke one. Clean, straight in half. I saw it coming.
The others are harder to notice. Maybe a bead chips here or there, or a strand falls away. But slowly they all decay. It’s a pattern I do recognize.
People tell me I’m smart. I don’t feel that way. They tell me, you are so smart. You know so much. Don’t sell yourself short. And I feel, I feel so much, like I know close to nothing.
Because I never used to make mistakes. And getting caught at lying and playing games I never used to play feels so foreign to me. I don’t recognize myself sometimes. It scares me when all I have are little pieces of a night. And I can’t remember parts that scare me most of all.
And it scares me that I can have wanted contact so much that I wouldn’t have refused.
It scares me that I am that alone.
Because it doesn’t last very long, that temporary high you get when someone tells you you’re beautiful. I’m worried I’m trading my soul for that drug.
And it scares me because I know one day I’m not going to have anything left to trade.

Very In Trouble (Listening to: Nugget, Cake)

I went out last night with Salamander, her boyfriend, and this guy who I guess we can call England Boy. He used to go to my school but he is doing a year in England and was back for winter break. My parents don't let me drive with teen drivers though, so I had to lie in order to leave with them.
Last year, when my friends started driving and I wasn't allowed to come, I started being left out of things we all did together, and I began to grow apart from them. I was miserable. I didn't have a best friend for the first time since I could remember. My friends started talking about me. It was easy, I guess, because I wasn't there. And I understand that some of the time it was because I overloaded my schedule and I was too busy to see anyone. But a large part of it was that there wasn't a way for me to get around and see them. And I have learned better than anything in the past year that when a friendship becomes an effort, no one wants to put the work in.
I started lying about the driving, saying someone's parents were driving me home. I tried to negotiate with my parents but they aren't the best at listening. And I've tried to explain the effect their rules have on my friendships, but it's one of those things where no one is going to agree because we are coming from fundamentally different premises and there's not a lot we can negotiate on. Really, what's happening is that my parents are making me choose between my friendships and their rules. Which really isn't a choice at all.
But we were driving around, and I lied to my parents and told them I was with my other friend Carmen San Diego, which was more logical since I was with Salamander and her boyfriend and England Boy on New Years.
My parents are never really around. They have a lot of rules, but they don't enforce them. They tell me I can't go out for a run after dark, and then they leave. I walk right out the front door and am back before they are. They tell me I can't watch more than an hour of television a day, but they aren't home. I turn on the tv and watch what I want. They tell me I can't drive with kids my age, but they don't check to see if I go where I say I do. I lie to them over the phone and get into cars with teens behind the wheels. They're lucky I do my homework, keep my grades up, and only tried weed for the first time on New Years. They're lucky I don't abuse their lack of parenting more. I don't think they understand that.
And maybe I should have respected that freedom. But really, it's not freedom. If I followed all their rules I wouldn't have a life and I wouldn't have friends. I cannot imagine a world where anyone I know would be able to follow them all.
We were all drinking at England Boy's apartment. Salamander and her boyfriend were making out, and I was looking at the view, and then England Boy and I ended up hooking up. I figured if I was home before midnight my parents might be ticked I hadn't called, but I wouldn't be in serious trouble. In the car on the way home, I heard my phone ringing. I picked up, and it was my dad. He had called Carmen's parents and knew I wasn't over there. I didn't have time to think of anything else to say, so I told the truth. I was in the car with Salamander and her boyfriend was driving.
I was still drunk. Salamander's boyfriend hadn't been drinking and we weren't breaking any laws other than the underage drinking one. But the driving was totally legal. Salamander's boyfriend is 18 and there were only three passengers in the car.
Astonishingly my parents didn't notice I was falling down drunk when I came home. I apologized a lot but tried to explain why I had to break their rules. The thing I actually do regret is worrying everyone. I should have just said I was with Salamander. Her parents knew we were hanging out and they would have told my parents that. But I guess I wasn't thinking, and I fucked up. It's the first time I've been caught doing anything bad, and my parents do not trust me at all anymore.
I hope they ground me for a few months and that can be it. I want to go to the RISD precollege art school program this summer, and it's expensive. My parents were reluctant to let me go anyways because it is so expensive. It's likely that they won't ground me for very long but they will tell me there is no way they can trust me for six weeks across the country with little adult supervision.
I could deal with a grounding anyway, it's not like I have time to go out after break is over anyway. Not with the play, Speech and Debate, and American Studies. And RISD would be an amazing experience for me. I hope they ground me.

High on New Years (Listening to: 1940, The Submarines)

The pieces of my life are losing their shapes. The places I’ve known have switched their limbs behind my back, mismatched signs on the wrong buildings. Used furniture stores with sale signs in the windows have become ice cream parlors and I can’t quite catch my breath. Street signs are stuck into the wrong corners so that Madison Street and Rainier Avenue have traded places. A weird déjà vu and I feel so full and brimming and dislocated. Gaping windshield like a hungry mouth in this car is a window to a rusty sky and cars that fly like knitting needles towards me and away. Patterns, patterns I cannot catch a hold of. Music is a soup, a delicious sloshing liquid that runs in and out of my mouth like the tides. Tasting it, seeing its hazy clouds drift in and out. The melodies melt into each other until I am bathing in this aquarium of sound. Snatches of conversation I do not understand and a thick foggy warmth. Every now and then, my name. Words that are not my name but are myself. I think in code, and the currents in the air strip into deciphered letters falling around me like leaves. I am so breathless. The people I’ve known all fading into one another, until all I see is one strange and rippling face. And all at once the music becomes one song, the places become one place, and the people one face. It is beautiful and very, very sad. Terrible, beautiful echoes. The three fade into each other, melt and swell and I see one big, so very infinitely big, one picture of today, now, this instant, forever and everything that came before. All melted together in this car, before me and the orange sky and hard blinking lights. My big sad eyes they say look like they are just about to cry. I don’t understand it. They touch me, ask if it is beautiful. Face, face, people I’ve known, that doesn’t begin to describe it.

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.

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.

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.