I fell in love, once upon a time.
We'd met through mutual friends. I was living here in Seattle, she was still back in Iowa. The first night I met her, M said, "Look! Twins!"
We did look like we were related. Dark hair, pale skin, pale eyes, and a certain Irish cast to our features. She had glittery lipstick on. I saw how it transferred when she kissed people, and I wanted some of that glitter on my lips. I'd just met her, and I was too shy to ask.
We kept crossing paths--which is hard to do if you're 1500 miles apart. Chance kept on throwing us together, and finally, with the intervention of the most cunning boy I knew, we managed to figure out that we liked each other.
We talked for hours online, sharing our dreams, unable to get enough of each other's brains. It was arranged that i'd see her when i visited, and we planned to scene together with my boyfriend.
Somewhere in there I crossed the line from "this is someone i like a lot" to "this is someone I love", but I kept my mouth shut about it. And waited and waited until I saw her.
I have never before or since fallen in love so completely and so quickly as I did that weekend. After the first scene, my boyfriend fell asleep, but we stayed awake, twined around each other and wanting desperately to talk to one another. We were tried to sleep, but after a couple of hours of this yearning, we got up. We snuck out of the hotel room together at two in the morning, sat in her car in the parking lot, and talked for hours.
At one point, she looked at me, her eyes full of light collected from the parking lot lights. "You get more beautiful every time I look at you, I swear." It took my breath away. I let myself go completely, any rein I was holding on my emotions was dropped as I shook, uncaring about where this was leading.
There was only her hand on mine, my voice quavering as I told her some of the secrets I've only told a few other people, before or since. Explaining how the inside of my head works. I couldn't cover all of it, not nearly. Looking at her profile in the flat light, shivering a little in the chill, wanting to stay right there forever. Knowing that there would be consequences, but not caring.
We were inseparable, much to my boyfriend's dismay. He'd expected us to like each other, had engineered things so that we would, but was unprepared for us to fall completely head over heels for one another.
It was intoxicating and seductive--everywhere I went I saw her reflected on the faces of strangers, I heard her in the cadences of other people's speech. Everything was colored by what I was feeling.
Yes, it did end eventually, but not before she'd helped propel me into a place where I could heal myself from a bunch of stuff in my past. The relationship simply dwindled to a close, the physical distance making it hard to keep up any sort of emotional closeness. I was still head over heels about her a good two years after that initial night, but the distance and time changed that as it does everything.
I still love her, and I miss her.
Two things about her:iconage
this is a dream that cannot be left, these
costumes and colors and jealous looks;
I am in her shadow and casting glances
I find they envy me her adornment. But never
in all the years we have vortexed has there
been such guilt, such fear, such unbalanced hope,
such little regard for the tomorrows that hold
us captive, the audience to our futures.
Asylum has come together and welcomed us,
dancing to a victory beat and holding
fast to the ways we drift. Flashing
forwards, backwards, I have lost my time
or my good intentions and perhaps
I am, like her, drunk on my inhibitions.
Painting our hands, ready for war.
The shield and sword around my neck,
the good hard metal of dreams....
for the pleiades, seen from a highway at night
Suffer, dreamer. The words translate
to a useless epithet, the malady
of thoughts rendering a small greeting
useless, almost without reaction.
or consequence. momentum and speed
live hand in hand for the green and
open road, the thin steel, the ways
thought becomes motion and motion
becomes distance and distance becomes
the fourth regret in a lifetime
without a past. Dream, sufferer.
It's the same greeting, ringing
like music, when the fathers go.
I'm writing about this today because it's been on my mind a lot, these memories are crowding me was the weather gets colder. And now that I am in good, strong relationships, I can look back on that time and see myself, so much emotionally younger, daring to bare my whole self for what was probably the first time.And I grieve for the girl that I was, but I'm happy that I got to experience the soul-changing experience that that relationship was for me.
Sometimes, the good stuff comes right in the middle of all the hurt, and you have to enjoy the good stuff while it lasts because it's there to help you ignore the pain. It's there to make you realize that the pain, too, has a point. It's there to give you a little hope, that terrible little maybe that keeps you moving from one day and one locus-knot of tension to another.
It's there because nothing is ever all bad. Even when you're completely crazy, there's always something.
It's that something that's kept me alive so far.
And the desire to see what comes next.
I'm home right now because I'm getting sick. I feel like someone has packed my neurons with concrete dust and I'm standing on my head trying to shake it out. The physical seems far away at the moment, I feel like i can feel the impulses traveling down my ulnar nerve to tell my fingers to move in the patterns that make these words.I came home from work at one and crashed out hard. I took a long nap, woke up, ate, and finished the book i was reading. I'm trying hard to keep everything low-key, mostly because I don't really feel like doing anything strenuous. And I'm going to bed soon. Perhaps sleep will make everything all right.
I can't decide if I'm actually sick or this is sleep deprivation. I keep forgetting that i'm not 17 any more, and my body likes me a lot better if I let it sleep at regular times.
These girls live in Iowa City.I was never cool like them. I was cool in an entirely different way. Perhaps it was endearing that I thought I wasn't cool at all. Or perhaps that really tripped out social circle wasn't cool like anyone else defines cool.
Or maybe it's a bit highschoolish to think about it in terms of relative coolness.
We were all scared to death, shaking in our own skins, pretending that we were something we weren't.
[one of those links from the farmhouse y2k page mentions West Liberty, IA. Which is where she lives, still, where the abovementioned drama took place.]
how goes the war?
underground for the moment.
