20. Darling

I had the wild misfortune of falling in love with a girl I despise.

That was to be the beginning. It was the direction the story would take: a dark recollection overwrought with bitterness that can be indulged for only so long. The tone and style of that initial sentence had once felt true, but the feeling that sprung it has not sustained.

I had admired her as she sulked through high school hallways, and I penned lines in a notebook, describing how her beauty was a mysterious one, how it evoked (and possibly provoked) both light and dark – pale skin framed by hair of shadow.

[It was in a Microsoft Word Document, I think. But you understand why I’d go with a notebook.]

Years later, I would know her not simply as some girl a grade above me.

But in the first sentence, you can glimpse the young man’s cynicism that had traveled from the first time she asked him for someone else’s phone number all the way to the first time she said she no longer wanted to be more than friends. The phone call she made was a success.

And I tried to hate her. At times, succeeding.

A side serving of years went by, and we made our own intimate mess – one where I could reclaim buried feelings of turquoise and hope: the two forging a new one.

There were others, too:

It couldn’t be labeled as “love-hate”. It was always one or the other. We left no room for ambivalence.

Hogwash.

What happened: “What happened?”

I dived into the confusion, leaving behind the unknown certainty (in the sense that something known became un-known) that ours was a fool’s errand. We were too different in a few bad ways and too similar in a lot of the worst ways, and soon – far too soon – a puppy’s love was replaced with a razor’s rust.

I won’t say what was wrong with her, because too often I had let her know, and that is, in my opinion, what was most wrong with me. Ultimately, we had refused to get along at the same time too much of the time.

Toward the end, we were always boiling over. And in a mode of defense, I pushed her away first. But when we pulled each other back in, I was inspired with fresh-baked hope that arrived within a disturbingly shallow temporal proximity to the moment I was faced with the just and not-so-swift requital of being pushed away myself. See how I try to avoid the simple facts? Trying to ignore the kernels of words unlike these: it was my fault.

The only apparent way to survive is found by recalling the worst in her, but all of these horrid, boulderous moments that once held height to block the sun have now been worn down to such a pebble’s proportion that they fall through the cracks.

What remains: a story with no story, a poem with no verse.

This was to be the end:

We opened up our chests, putting cigarettes out on each others’ hearts.

But that’s a lie. Even figuratively, it’s false. Just as most of the above may be in the next year, or decade, or hour.

 

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