Rememory

I was looking through old drafts of blog posts, and I found this one. Apparently I never posted it, or, if I did, I went to edit it later and never put it back up. An essay from my junior year of high school.

I am in their house, his house, but the doors are twice my height. My sisters wear large pink dresses, layers of tulle bursting around their legs. They wobble about, unable to support their heavy crowns. Although I must stand on tiptoes to see over the couch, the dresses are too small. I leave the other girls and go upstairs, looking for him. I find him using the computer in the kitchen. I sit next to him, on the same chair but barely touching, and he shows me how to fight with animated soldiers.

He races up the hill in my backyard and I chase him, trying to release the competitive spirit that he has been coaxing from me all night. He trips over a tree root and slows, I slam into him, we tumble down. He catches himself on his elbows before landing above me, but his leg still comes down on mine and I groan. I look down, trying to disentangle, and I see his pale, pale arms, glowing in the barely-there moonlight.

The moon is above us, and we are silhouetted in its light. I dance down the middle of the street, ignoring the glass shards in my hand, forgetting that I’m leaving tomorrow. I dangle the spicy mint he wants so badly in front of his face before snatching it away as he lunges and I twirl down the street, singing “mine, mine, mine.” He gives up, returning to the sidewalk, but I continue to twirl and joy under the dull moon. Then he is beside me, grabbing me, pulling me over and a car runs by so fast I can barely see it, so close I can almost touch it. He saves me. Our mothers say that now we have to get married, like the rescued damsels in distress do in all the stories, and our blushes are hidden by the dangerous darkness. I still do not give him the mint.

We are back, before it all, in Iona, where the beach is close and the tide closer. My sister hit him earlier, and he didn’t hit her back, because he never hurt anyone, not back then. He has taught me to fight the way I could, has taught me not to flinch from pain by hurling ping-pong ball after ping-pong ball right at me, but would never hit a girl, would never hurt a soul, would always save my life. I trust his goodness. Our families are on the couches, spread out and close together, and we play a card game that is more laughing than thinking. I am wet for the first time. I notice, but I don’t know what it means. When I go to the bathroom later, there is a bloody spot on the inside of his basketball shorts, the ones I wear because my luggage is lost. My mother gives me Motrin and a bulky pad and cleans the shorts and tells me that I am a woman now, and I wear her sweatpants to bed and think but I am still twelve, and I am confused by all this growing up when all I really want is to play another round of cards.

I lie in bed that night in a room with my sisters but in my own bed because now I am special, now I am old. I realize, as the last bit of wakefulness leaves me, that my body has just told me that it is ready for sex, for love, for children. I try to picture it, but I don’t know how. The next day, I examine the books in the house until I find one with vivid sex scenes, perfectly specific, and I read until I can see it in my head and have to put the book down because the image disgusts me.

I am fifteen now and he is naked, above me around me within me, sweating, panting, shaking arms dark and glowing in the dim lamplight. I toss and turn, the visual plaguing me even though it has not happened and is based entirely on imaginings, but it makes my insides warm in a way that no other dreams do, and I decide not to chase it away.

It is snowing, and he is at my house, and we chase and run with a flock of children, throwing snowballs, and I see him break a window but he doesn’t know I saw. When the window is found later, no one ever knows that it was him. He wrestles his sister who is less than half his size after she calls him weak and emasculated and worthless. He is pushing her, tugging her, pinning her down with the arms that hold him over above within me. She claws at him, writhes, but cannot escape, and he tries to smother her with a pillow. I scream.

I can never marry him, never be with him, says my mother, because he is angry and only knows how to hit. That’s what comes of having a father like his.

I am sprawled across a couch in my basement, the gangling limbs that I’ve finally come to control and love and cherish stretching all the way from armrest to armrest. He is seated on the other couch, joystick in his hands, voice calm, steering an animated car around and around an animated track, destroying competitor after competitor as he tells me that he and his girlfriend broke up because he got angry and didn’t know what to do, that it just comes out, that, that now he’s not allowed to drive because his mother saw him hit his sister. “I don’t know why it happens,” he tells me, looking only at the television. “I can’t control it, can’t see it coming, I just get angry, sometimes.”

He breaks things.

We stand in the lights of the subway car, close together although it is late and the car is empty, falling into each other with each bump and curve and turn and stop. His eyes go transparent, the pale green-blue washed out by the bright bright lights, and I can see through him and into him and he is mine and I love him and I want him but I know he is not safe.

I bike down roads less than a mile from home but they are foreign now. I go faster and faster, imagining monsters on my tail, fighting to get away, fighting the urge to go to his house and throw rocks at his window and cry that I want him and need him and beg him to hold me. I cannot go there, cannot do that, cannot let him know because even if he loves me, even if he wants me, I cannot have him. I pedal, and I cry, and I pray, seriously for the first time in my life, that this hurt can go away, that this love can run its course and leave me because I am too feeble to fight him and to weak to let go. I must not love a boy who is dangerous.

Moooovie

The Sturken encounter was fine. We actually ended up talking for a couple of hours, but it was just as friendly people, with nothing of the something of before. The Harry Potter movie was fabulous. It completely destroyed the book, but it was horrifically exciting. Julie spent a lot of time saying "it didn't happen like that!" and Gretchen and I clutched each other at the very predictable sudden zombie appearance. It was fun.

In other news, I'm going to blatantly steal another portion of Nyx's life. Can I help it if she's doing more interesting things than I am? After all, no one really wants to read about Sturken and I complaining about are siblings and noting his anger issues. Actually, I'll tell you anyways. He hit his sister's arm a few weeks ago because he was just so mad at her, and he needed somewhere for the violence to go, and I said that I'd never experienced that sort of violent impulse, and his response was that he did kind of have some anger issues, but "I'm not a psychopath! really!" My response was, "if you were, I think I'd have noticed by now."

He agrees with Nyx that our hometown is stifling. "London's really opened my mind," he said. "Not that your mind isn't open. You seem really, uh, universalist." I laughed. "It's just, for me, I was really close-minded before I left. Kind of a jerk, really." He still used gay as an insult once during the evening, so he must have been truly awful before. I told him about the boob bead (minus the boob part) and he thought it was kind of awesome in a rather gross way, but recommended that I not tell Mario. We gossiped some, and he agreed that Johannes is really rather odd. We mostly just talked, on and on and on, for literally hours, while he played some racing game on our gamecube and I hid in the basement from my sisters, who were playing fashion show. He showed himself as perpetually more flawed as the time wore on. At first, he made fun of me for being on the math team. Then, later, we talked about SAT-IIs, and he mentioned that he'd actually been on it in middle school. It's nice that he takes the IQ thing for granted. He willingly admitted that I was a bit smarter than he was, but it didn't seem to bother him, it just was. I think that since we've known each other so long, we take the things that would normally make us inaccessible (my nerdiness and his excessive athleticism (he can do A LOT of push-ups. It's scary)) as just part of who we are.

It's odd, really, how different it was from the last time I saw him. I still like him, obviously, but it's lost all of the physical attraction that there was. I think I've finally managed to file him under extended family. He's just another one of the endless string of odd cousins. Shelby, on the other hand, just can't get used to it. When she was eight, during my nightmare trip, she informed the family that "I want to hit him, but I don't know why," and proceeded to attack him. Yesterday, while we were standing around in the yard, she just spontaneously bit him. It was entirely bizarre. He was shocked at first, but when we talked it over later, he seemed to be over it. "It's funny, really, you and Shelby," he said.

I sighed. "Yeah, I just can never understand her. Genie I get, but Shelby's just completely alien."

"Well, you're really polar opposites. You're a complete introvert, and she's more extroverted. She's entirely impulsive, and you think before you act. And then Genie's somewhere in the middle."

Poor Genie, always somewhere in the middle. If I didn't love her to pieces anyways, I'd feel bad.

Oh, he remembered me talking about Gretchen two years ago, and continues to deliberately mispronounce her name, and he even talked about Nyx's biking accident. He said everyone thought she was going to die, which is, really, kind of awful.

Speaking of Nyx, she's gone and had another accidental date. The boys seem to be falling all over each other to get to her =). Direct quote below.

OH CRAP.

if my head were ANY denser, my brain would be a ShamWOW towel.

that is my analogy for last night. yay for un-dating!

i went to see harry potter with this guy. i've thought of him as like an older brother before, so i didn't think it was that weird. even when we saw the preview for twilight, in which bella says to edward, "it's my birthday, kiss me" and he leaned over and said, "it's my birthday..." i thought he was joking. i mean, he didn't protest when i paid for my own ticket.

after the movie we went to longshore because i had never seen it at night before. we sat on one of the catamarans and talked for a really long time. finally my mom's friend called and asked where i was, and i said i'd be home soon. Yamaha pulled me closer on the catamaran, but still i was just thinking, "this can still be friendly, right?" finally i said we should go, and he leaned over towards me.....dialogue to follow in next post.

Later...

what are you doing?
What do you mean, what do you think I'm doing?
Don't do it!
Why not?
Dude, really....
What?
It's just....you're twenty-two!
So what if I am?
You're six years older than me! Doesn't that mean anything to you?
No. It doesn't.
Why not?
Why should it? Ulysses and Cleo are about the same distance apart.
Seriously! I'm sixteen!!
I know.
Doesn't that bother you?
No.
Why not? Why doesn't it bother you?
What do you mean, why?
Why....am I your favorite dispatcher? (reference to earlier at work) Why me?
Well, I've really enjoyed this conversation we've been having....(lists random reasons that don't mean anything)....and i'm attracted to you.
That's it? You're attracted to me? That's silly.
No it's not. That's what it's about!
Seriously. You're ridiculous.
Are you lecturing your elder?
You need lecturing.
Come on, are you afraid?
No. I'm just not interested. I don't think of you that way, I think of you like a brother.
Then why are you sitting here with me...like this?
I would sit with my brother like this!! Well...not like this, precisely....(indicating closeness of faces)
This conversation went on for some time, but i didn't give in. Finally i sat up and turned to him, saying:
Wait. is this gonna be awkward tomorrow? Because if it's awkward I'll punch you.
I'd rather you didn't punch me.
So don't make it awkward.

later on, walking back to the car.

Okay wait. This is ALREADY awkward. Stop it. You need to learn how to not be awkward!
And you need to learn how to not be afraid.
Do not. I'm not afraid of anything.
Yeah you are. You totally wanted to kiss me back there.
I did not. You wish.
Uh-huh.
You're being preposterous.
Yeah, okay Nyx....

fortunately after that we got back to normal conversation.