After my last post I realized it marks the first time I’ve written about me and this boy in our twenties. “It’s so weird,” I said to Ella, when I was asking for her opinion on the piece. “We met when we were fourteen.”
In my words and hazy recollections we’d been frozen in time, rudderless teenagers doomed to make the same mistakes and have the same stilted conversations, never reaching a resolution of any sort. We were young adult fiction. He was always going to be the way I knew him: messy and insightful and naive and sweet and distant. His stepmother picked him up after school and he never took notes on homework so I had to remind him over Yahoo! Messenger. He owned a Zune and he wanted to borrow my Juno and Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist DVDs. He started dating a girl over text messages and broke up with her (also over text messages) after a month. He was always taking a break from love, and he was always in love with somebody else. One day, we were going to open an all-ages music club.
I was eighteen when I’d last seen him. He wasn’t around for when I sank into depression, or when I got my first job and got published, or when I moved away from the only town I’d ever known as home. I don’t know anything about him or his life now, either. So to have found us there, four years later—eight years later, even—I was struck by the starkness. We’ve been coming of age completely independently from one another. We’ve reached the aftermath. We’re old enough to have had sex, to pay taxes, to live on our own. (Technically, of course.)
It reminded me of a conversation we had the summer before we became juniors in high school, a summer of review classes and college applications. I was so sure I’d had my life mapped out, but he was still having trouble seeing where he was going from there. His attitude about the whole thing was decidedly noncommittal and blasé. At one point he said he wanted to be a pilot. Or maybe a musician, who knew. “You don’t give a flying fuck about it,” I said to him, not a question. I wanted him to give a fuck. He told me, “Someday I will.”
I’m pretty sure that someday has come and gone. I’m pretty sure I missed it.
Because I’m a sucker, I romanticized the whole idea of it, I think. I imagined that I could understand what the characters in those self-indulgent movies about fumbling your way through adulthood and relationships from your past and present (About Alex, Celeste and Jesse Forever, etc.) are going through. I read essays from Chloe Caldwell and Melissa Broder and re-read All This Has Nothing to Do with Me and Mickey with an entirely new comprehension level. I even made a god damn playlist.
Which, again, is really new and really weird. I used to be able to appreciate these things as an outsider. I guess I just didn’t realize I’d be able to relate to them so soon, even in the most basic, fleeting sense. I’m in a brand new demographic and my life’s starting to reflect that.
A lot of my friends told me how much my moment of anti-clarity resonated with them and their own experiences, even if they differ in the specifics. I poke fun (and cringe) at the idea of “#relatable reads” and hugot culture, but there’s still really something about the universality of certain situations and emotions: “I get that.” I think that’s what I was trying to do, too, looking for solace and new perspectives in the creative work of other people.
From the Olena Kalytiak Davis poem “Kafka and Milena About to Meet in Vienna”:
when i last saw you
i handed you a poem in which you were already dead
when i last saw you
you misunderstood what i hadn’t yet just said
when i last saw you
there was a blanket over my head
you said you knew where i lived
the threshold and the backward glance
i am glad you aren’t here now
but (in the margins) i am also sad
not your face
only the way you walked away
through the tables in the café
From “Business, Yeah” by The Preatures:
I saw you on the street today, you were
looking worse off than I remember
When I held you in my hands, but man,
my hands didn’t understand what they were holding
And now I, I know you live it
I see it you live it
For me it’s just business
...
Do you walk around talking to me? Do you
still get that pain in your chest?
Does it make you nervous?
You might be thinking: “If you’re so over him, how are you still writing about him this way?” I don’t think it’s something so simply put. I’m still kicking myself over the way everything unfolded, but I don’t really want to go back in time and do it over. There are so many things I’ll never know for sure, but I’m holding on to the things I have found to be true. (Like the fact that he’s kept the wrong people around.) My need to get it all out is more about the circumstances than it is about a particular person.
And I might have used him just to get some creative exploitation out of it.
Okay, okay, I definitely did.
These songs and books are showing me that I’m not alone in my momentary lapses of judgment and emotion and that I’m not being defensive. You don’t have to want something to miss it.
When I finished that essay I found that I still don’t write about anyone the way I write about him. That doesn’t mean anything, though, because everyone I’ve had a crush on Post-Him has been an acquaintance at best. Sometimes I wonder if I write about him differently, or if he would recognize himself at all in my paragraphs and verses. Thing is, I don’t quite think I even do anymore, myself.
