Under a Lock

Dear Beau,

We got lost somewhere along the way. You said “something happened to what we used to be” and yesterday I figured it out. You lost yourself. My shrink once told me “people change but their essence remains the same.” You were still that gorgeous guy that played guitar late at night, watched series with his dad and liked wine. What I’m trying to say is, you changed, you stopped trying to make us work.

And it’s okay. We’re young and I shouldn’t have expected so much out of you. You weren’t ready to be my person. You weren’t ready to tell your friends about me, travel together, introduce me to your family or talk about our future. It was a dead end relationship from the very start. But it was beautiful. So goddamn beautiful and fuck anyone who says otherwise.

We were two people in love. God, I still love you. I think a part of me always will. Right now, I am setting you free. I don’t hate you or resent you for not putting in as much as I did. I understand you weren’t ready.

I wish you the best. If you got back together with your ex, good for you, she’ll give you whatever I couldn’t.

Goodbye, this will be the last letter I write you. It will go in the box where I kept all of your unsent love letters. It will be hidden in my closet, far away from view, under a lock, with a thousand other memories I’m not strong enough to dust off.

Always,

G.

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You and me.

You and me. We’re like a hot, bright firework.

It doesn’t matter that the hot part is over, and was over more than 10 years ago now. The hot part where we just shot into the sky and fucking exploded and fell in love way too quick and both got really scared about how intense it was. How we were saying it to each other wide-eyed and incredulous, writing it to each other on paper making it real. We would get in your bed and stay up literally all night making out. We couldn’t stop. We’d fall asleep for a couple hours with our faces pressed together and our hearts and eyelids fluttering and our tattoos smushing together into new designs and our breathing in rhythm all too-perfect-like. I’ve kissed a lot of boys and I still remember your kisses. If they hadn’t been so vivid and volcanic and all over me and impossible the next part might not have happened.

That’s the part where the firework is still happening but it’s losing its heat. It’s still sparkling and shimmering and still there…but the real explosion is over. All the little stars are moving away from each other but the idea of what was there still exists, filling out the shape. That’s the part that happened after you smashed my heart. You got more scared than me. You moved thousands of miles away. But then you came back. And you kept coming back into my life for years. We kept going through the motions as much as other relationships and life would allow. Sometimes we’d see each other every day. Our bands played shows together. For a while we were even neighbors. I never stopped wanting to kiss your face. Every single second we spent together getting coffee, watching movies, lounging around outside, talking about stupid shit like robots and our bands and our lives and relationships and how we wanted everything and nothing and were never satisfied…I could barely look at your neutron star eyes that I kept falling into for years. We both knew it and didn’t know it. You apologized for everything from forever ago. Said you were wrong, scared. Our hearts were both bloody on our sleeves but we didn’t want to ruin each other’s lives…though we came so close so many times…every time you threw pebbles at my window or put your head in my lap when we were sitting on a bench or showed up drenched in a rain storm at my door. Every time we hugged so tight and so long when we parted, your face buried in my long hair, your eyelashes flicking my cheek. I think you held me like that to keep our lips as far apart as they could reasonably be in an embrace. My heart would pound so hard I thought it might knock you over. We shimmered and sparkled around and outside ourselves.

I got married. And that’s the part where we turned to ash. You told me once you thought we’d have ended up together for good if I’d never met my husband and I still agree. We’re grown up now. The universe still keeps cleverly throwing our daily orbits together, over and over again. But it’s cool now. I run into you often. I don’t have a heart attack anymore. I’m just happy I still get to see your face while the ash whirls and falls around us and quietly settles on our cheeks and eyelashes, in our hair, on our hands, on the ground.

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Heart Around Your Picture

I am an adult. The time when you are awkwardly squirming to see if you can get your knee to brush against someone has long passed. A good 15 years passed. That’s why it was so odd that I found someone recently trying to do that to me. And they were even older than I was – farther from their teenhood. Farther from years where it may have been an acceptable means of displaying sexual tension. At first I was kind of grossed out by this awkward display of teen-like affection.

But as I was walking home alone, I had to appreciate it for the memories it brought up. When you are a teenager, these moments are thrilling. Even if you aren’t into the person, there is a least a story to tell your friends. “omigod they were totally trying to touch me when they passed me in the bleachers!”

You were one of the best examples of this awkward inches-from-each-other-really-wanting-to-touch-each-other thing.

I have a heart around your picture in my 8th grade yearbook. You were the grade below me, but you probably stayed back, so I bet you were older. You were super skinny and really really tall. I was short so it probably was amplified by my shortness, but you seemed like a total beanpole. You would pass in the hallway and my friend and I would whisper to each other “so cute!”

You had a blonde bowl haircut. That described everyone in my town though, so it didn’t make you stand out. I just still picture you like that now. An adult with a 7th grader in the 90’s haircut.

Somehow I took you to my semi formal. I actually don’t know how I arranged that.

I was thrilled to be dancing with you. Holding you close. Hoping my hair was in place. Hoping my bobby pins weren’t poking your chest. Hoping I smelled good to you. Hoping my dress was short enough, but not too short.

After the dance we “watched a movie” at my best friend’s house. That basically means you put a movie on and spend the next hour and forty five minutes trying to discern what every millisecond of movement means. Trying to inch closer with an exhale? Trying to move away with a stretch?

I don’t think we took it anywhere from there but even that one evening of crazy tension and eventual hand-holding-under-the-blanket was exhilarating.

Even though you are kind of gross and old fashioned now, I’m glad that you were a young crush. Back when innocence made a simple brush of flesh more thrilling than anything you can imagine now. Back when it wasn’t some odd creepy thing an older man does when your skirt is too short for them to contain themselves.

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Pants

The first time we made out you made me so late for a show. I was meeting up with some of my favorite people and yet I couldn’t make myself leave your house.

I had to go all the way home and change my pants. I don’t usually get quite that wet making out with people. As if you made me a teenager again for a moment. No more grey jeans around you.

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Cute Boy

Once upon a time all the magic I was hoping for totally messed up and arrived all on one night. You made me believe that.

I was a tiny college child. I was infatuated with you, but not in any creepy way…you were sort of this muse who popped in and out of my life and my line of sight while I fell in love with other boys and frolicked about. I didn’t even know your name. I called you Cute Boy. We were thrown together by college things from time to time, and once you said you liked my socks. But who cares about socks!? I just wanted to do you. I had to read Daphnis and Chloe for class and decided you were the Daphnis to my Chloe…so I called you Daphnis instead. Then I stopped and called you Cute Boy again. But never any of this to your fucking cute face. I just wrote poems about you instead.

One night I went to see the Flaming Lips with another boy. I left to walk home convinced I was made of music and glitter and flowers and fake blood and cigarettes and vodka. It had been the most special and awesome show of my life thus far and I couldn’t shut up about it. I left a trail of confetti all the way through the city to my doorstep where I sat at 2am with that other boy and smoked rainbow cigarettes and giggled about how pissed my roommate would be when we went upstairs and made a ruckus before passing out in my tiny dorm bed. Something made us stay outside instead of going inside to snuggle.

I was mid-drag on my hot pink cigarette when you walked up my steps and sat next to me. I thought maybe someone had slipped me something at the show because I was clearly imagining this. You said Hi. You knew my name. You said we should hang out, that it was long overdue. You gave me your number on this small scrap of yellow paper. You said you hoped I would call soon, kissed me on the cheek and took off into the night. The other boy could not believe it – he knew about you, how I felt about you, had even seen you before. We were just friends and he proclaimed that night to be the most magical night.

So I called you. And we went out. And we made out. A lot. I told you everything about how I had thought you were cute for so long but too shy to do anything about it, and you told the same things back to me. That it was the same for you. You had the deepest darkest sparkling eyes and your bed head destroyed me. One night during a crazy lighting storm you told me you thought you might love me and I believed you. Until the next morning when it dawned on me that that, was probably the end.

And it was. I think your proclamation of love scared you. We saw each other a few more times to make out and listen to music and smoke cigarettes. We left for the summer and chatted online a few times but never saw each other. The next fall we made out a couple of times and went record shopping, and that was that. I wasn’t disappointed because I knew the magic had peaked that first night. My friend even said.

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Lost Forever.

I lost the only love note you ever gave me. It was the best love note I ever got. Most emotional. Most intense. Most real. Most true. I put it in the blue cup on my windowsill. At some point, I must have gotten worried it would fade in the sun, so I moved it to my box of notes. Under the bed. That must be what happened because the only other terrifying possibility is that my mom found it. Read it. And threw it away?

I had a confidence in our love that I have never been able to replicate. I was so sure that it was forever that I wasn’t jealous when you told me about girls you had crushes on. I wasn’t jealous when you went away to college and were surrounded by other women. Older women. More experienced women. I wasn’t jealous when you dated other women. Women you really liked a whole lot and had a lot of feelings for. It didn’t matter to me, because I knew we would ultimately be together. We had to be.

I almost feel like I wasn’t even jealous when you married her. I still didn’t think it was real.

Now I’m not sure if it was the best love note ever because I can’t reread it repeatedly. We didn’t have electronic archives of every emotion back then. We only had rereading the note until the corners were bent and the creases started permanently fading the ink. Maybe it was a horrible love note and you weren’t even that into me. It’s lost forever though now, so I’ll just never know. I guess getting jealous wouldn’t have helped, but perhaps it was foolish of me to not see. I sometimes feel more mournful about the lost note than the lost love. However brief, that emotion was real and spoken. Not lost forever.

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Reflections of a teen love.

Your photo hung in my locker.
Your doodles were all over my notebook.
Your signature was in my yearbook.
Your phone number was memorized.

You tucked my hair behind my ear.
You pushed me up against my locker.

I was so afraid.
But I wanted you so much.
I wished I was older. Older enough to handle it.
But now that I’m old enough to handle you, we don’t fit.
Don’t match. Wouldn’t belong together.

Maybe teenagers are just less judgmental.
They love easy. No discernment.

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