Jack and Diane
I have believed in that one great love since I was a little girl, or at least as long as I can remember, granted those two are not the same. Though I would equate this ideal to fantasy, it was not your average fairy tale. I did not believe in being taken away from my misery by some knight in shining armor. That was my mother's dream. And I have never wanted any of those.
But I have believed that there was such a thing as unconditional love. Not that I had have ever experienced it, not in any form; neither had I witnessed it in any others' union. A few decades later and that point has not changed. And maybe that point, the not having witnessed, is the reason, or at least a contributing factor to, why I still believe. Still.
My fairy tale, and the star of it, has changed ever so slightly over the years. It has never been based on a real person, not in my personal life, nor any famous person as young girls are apt to do. But it was based on some conglomeration of characteristics that I have picked from people over the years. It was the way that one boy smiled at me that made my knees actually buckle beneath me. It was the way that one would tilt his head to the side when he said my name. The other who would push on my chest, just in the place that tightened when a moment became real. And at some point these would take on the look of those people, and the pathology of that relationship, too. When I accepted the burning in my stomach from him into my ideal, it came part and parcel with the spiky dark hair and the vacancy in his eyes when he left.
With the good, came the bad, and the look that equated both together.
In the third grade it was Terry. I don't remember his last name, but I remember the gaps between his growing in grown up teeth. The thing about Terry was he liked me too. Even at 8 I knew he did. He chased me around the playground tirelessly. I loved being chased. I knew that it meant he had chosen me. At some point, I felt it was time to take our relationship to the next level. I stopped running. He stopped running too. Not too long later he started running again...after Mary Jo, the new girl. I guess he wasn't ready for commitment. This I learned then, and would never be too eager to stop running again.
In the fourth grade it was Jason Campbell. He sat next to me. He was shy and smart, but still popular somehow. Sitting next to him, my chest would contract every time his arm would sweep past mine. I thought that if I got his attention, he would love me. That’s how simple it was then. And so I did what I could, or what my 9 year old self could do, to make him notice me. What I remember was mimicking him during the flag salute each morning, as if I was his mirror image. How could he deny our meant to be-ness? This is still a mystery to me, how a man would not be enamored by the woman stalkingly mirroring his every movement, well it still boggles my mind. But I learned from Jason that distance is more becoming than any closeness.
In the sixth grade it was Richard Godwin, and thus began my unlikely (read "predictable") love affair with the bad boy. Richard was as bad as they come, and last I heard, he only got worse. I was a very innocent 11 year old girl. No I'm not being sarcastic or ironic. I actually was. Richard would say things to me, sexual things, and I would make my grossed out face and walk away. But honestly, I didn't know what they meant. I learned over that year to listen to what he said and use all of my deductive reasoning skills to figure out what the terms meant, so that I wouldn't have to ask anyone and be ...embarrassed or vulnerable or have the sky fall on my head. For instance, one day we were doing a crossword puzzle in class with the week's vocab words. We were sitting all around the room, working in pairs and such. I was sitting at the table in the corner with some friends, and some boys, and Richard. He leaned over to me and smiled in what I had already learned was a naughty way. He said, "I’ll give you the answer if you give me head." Now I didn’t know what this meant, but the power of my deductive reasoning was about to get a clue. "For each inch you suck, I’ll give you one answer." Ok, not a tough one to figure out at 30, but at 11 it never occurs to you that people would do ...that. At least it didn't to me, not until right then. I do credit Richard with helping me learn an invaluable lesson though. No, not giving head. I learned that much later. But with the ability to be completely shocked, mortified, appalled, and maybe even a little curious, and never show it. A skill that has become very important in my chosen line of work. But despite all of that, Richard had me enthralled. Or maybe because of that. It was exciting, a boy who knew more than me. Doesn’t happen very often. One day Richard gave me a small craft bumble bee attached to a wire. I think I still have it; it’s in my sixth grade box. I used to pull it out and look at it all the time. Proof that one boy loved me. The funny thing is, I think he did really like me, beyond the idea of getting me to do those things he talked about. And maybe it is just an outgrowth of my savior complex, but sometimes I have thought that had I not been too scared to take him up on his offer to "go out with" him, though we would never have gone anywhere, I think ...well maybe all those things I heard about him years later wouldn't have happened. Or so I like to think. But that lesson, the one of not showing what you are thinking or feeling, that’s the one that stuck with me. I am now an expert. Sometimes I can’t even tell what I am feeling.
There were a couple of crushes here and there in Jr high; it is the height of boy craziness. But it wasn't until Jeremy Mayo in the 8th grade that I had my real first boyfriend. And with this one, I don't think I ever thought he really liked me. But every girl in my group of friends liked him. We liked to say he had a thousand watt smile. He was a charmer, for a 13 yr old boy. A few days later he was walking me out of school at the end of the day. He leaned in to kiss me, my first kiss. Or it would have been had I not tilted my head ever so slightly down to make contact not with our lips, but with our foreheads instead. I broke up with him the next day. A preemptive strike against the inevitable. This just the first in a very very long line. Fortunately this one worked out in my favor as Jeremy, with puberty, became quite smelly.
There were to be an uncountable mass of boy-crushes, and a few girl-crushes, that would define both what I wanted in a relationship and what it would most definitely look like. And at the same time, in the same breath even, they defined how none of these would ever be enough, would never be the one and how I would learn to get out of every romantic entanglement for decades to come.
There was of course one that the picture rested on most completely. Or as my therapist would later say of him, that my world view would be based on.
There is this boy-man, tall and terribly thin. He’s not an athlete for real, but in some fringed way, like a surfer. He is not quite effeminate, but certainly not masculine. He is shockingly smart, smarter than me, but not a drop of pretension. He is soft and loving, but still distant and mysterious. I only know he loves me sometimes. I know that I love him less; I have to. We make plans for the future, our future, neither saying that we never believed a word of it. We are both damaged, and we know that the other recognizes that, and loves the damage, but will never be able to get to the person, the small, scared person who lives on the other side of that damage. He does fight for it, for that entrance, to scale the walls. In short bursts he rides against my windmills. I give him small pieces to ensure that he keeps riding, but never the entrance he would need to stay. And so he goes away, only to return at some other time with sweeping gestures of a love that will necessarily end, for it is too full of youth, lost in our sophomoric ideals.
We are both in love with tragic love stories, and we are writing our own, in broken unfinished melodramatic stanzas passed back and forth in the back of French class, sailed across oceans, never received. And as adults we ache as we read of the tragedy that we never really let happen, that we never finished writing. We envision the day when we will write an ending for the story. But as it turns out he stops running before I do. And when he stops and doesn’t see me, he gives up on our ending, he stops waiting for me to come back for the next chapter. He walks away, not alone.
Some where along the line the ideal looks only a little like him, or like I imagine he would, if he still existed. In my mind he still has short, spiky hair. He’s dressed in the same grunge of our youth. He has a lilt. He is androgynous. He is still too distant to be real. I am still running, in hopes that he will chase me. There was poem and a story and a made up lost memory of a dead brother taken too soon that gave him a name. His name is Jack. Jack will know me the moment he lays eyes on me. He will understand all my fears, and my tactics to avoid loving him. And he will outsmart me…by being honest, by not running, by not giving up on me. It will be a love story without too much drama, without tragedy, unremarkable to all but those who have really loved someone forever.
I am sitting in a bar reading, writing a story, telling a tale to myself, as I often do. Lost in the fantasy world that I layer upon a disappointing reality. I take another drink and for a moment remember where I am; I remember that there are people all around me. Just then someone walks slowly over to me with a knowing smile. Baggy jeans with holes at the knees and paint splatters. A button down shirt buttoned one off center. Wavy dark hair messily covering one eye. A hand is gently taking mine, softly holding, steady. Holding my eyes a little too long. “I’m Jack,” she says. I lower my head so she doesn’t see the blush rising from under my shirt. I take hold, ready to stop running, raise my head slowly, cocked to the side, one eye brow high and a thousand watt smile, a way that I have learned is enticing. “I’m Diane.”
posted by Solador at 10:46 PM
0 comments
