Post Love

I left my wife three years ago.
I write about the women that fill up the void.

Intermission Twenty

I wrote something for the first girl I ever liked. I don’t know what made me write, or what I wrote. But I know that I never had any intention of giving it to her. It was just a simple expression of a new feeling. I was twelve and I didn’t understand anything yet. I just had to get it out. 

My best friend Tom laughed at me when he found it in my room. Tom was an obese rich kid, and I was a skinny poor kid, both outcasts in our own way. We balanced eachother out, I guess. I’ll always remember when he left my room that day. Part of me knew he had taken the note, but I didn’t want to think that he did. I still believed in the goodness of people, then. I didn’t understand anything yet.

Sally was the least attractive girl in school, but she was popular somehow. She had a nice smile, she was friendlier than the others, funnier, bigger than the others. She wore sweatpants, baggy white t-shirts and cool sneakers and she knew everything already. I knew it was her hard earned popularity that made the decision. No, she didn’t like me back. She laughed when she said it, and I was angry because I hadn’t even asked. I didn’t want an answer. She was never supposed to know. She was never supposed to read the note. But that’s how it went. Tom had gained popularity, everyone had gotten a laugh, and I was starting to learn. My first crush, my first denial, hand in hand, that was my first lesson in love. Girls were terrifying, best friends were terrifying, life was cut throat, I numbed the shock by pretending it didn’t happen. 

By next year, hormones had gotten the best of me again, and so I started to like Kate. She sat a seat over from me and was the most attractive girl in class. She’d hit puberty before everyone else. She was tall, with long legs, shapely thighs and hips, and braces. She got all the attention. I liked to tease her because it made her laugh, and that made me feel good. One day after gym class one of the guys said that I liked her, and another guy made fun of me. Then everyone did. Good luck, they all said. One kid said they were wrong, said that Kate liked me. Then they all picked on him instead. Majority rules, and I believed them. I believed that Kate probably didn’t like me, that I had no chance with her, and finding out was not worth the rejection that was sure to follow. And so they all got their shot at her, and I got away pain free. 

One hot summer day I thought about Kate. It was summer break, and I hadn’t seen her in weeks. I felt adventurous in the warm dusk and rode my bike to her house. I don’t know why. Maybe I hoped to run into her. I rode past the house, then the other way, then again. I went around the block and came back around. Then I went home. 

A year later my parents, still together then, had moved us to a new town and a new school. I could have started over then, had I had any grasp on myself yet. I was so lost. I was still missing the third eye that looks back at you and tells you about yourself. Severely lost. On one my first days there, I made eye contact with a girl in the lunch room. We both looked at eachother, looked away terrified, then repeated. I got to know her somehow. I don’t remember exactly how. Her name was Gertie, and we would walk to the bus stop together after we found out we lived close to eachother. We became friends. Another girl and an older guy from school started walking with us. One day when it was just Gertie and I, months after we’d known eachother and I had given up on ever being with her, she tried to close the ever-growing silent gap between us. She said she was lonely, she said she wanted a boyfriend, she said no one ever liked her. Then she looked at me. I was terrified. I didn’t say anything. I was hurt. To me and my bottomless insecurities, she was saying that she wanted to date someone, not me. I was stupid. I could have kissed her right then and there, and I would have had my first girlfriend. My first awesome grunge girlfriend that makes me laugh and wears combat boots to school. God, I loved her. And so we went on being friends, suppressing my liking of her, avoiding the pain, completely terrified of her. 

Time passed, and I had long given up on Gertie. Instead I had developed a pattern of getting crushes on girls, obsessing over them, staring at them, never talking to them, and moving on. Teenage semen flew joyfully around my bedroom to the visions of them, the great detailed fantasies I had about them, and I seemed almost content never talking to any of them. I knew what happens when you admit that you like them. The fantasies built a wall between us, created a distance that kept me safe form them. And then one day on the bus, I was zoning out while Gertie, the older guy, and the other girl were talking amongst eachother. I did that a lot back then. I’d sit completely lost in my thoughts, endlessly, living in my head. But somehow, I heard him say it. I heard him say most of the words in the sentence, at least. He was speaking to me, saying something along the lines of “and we all know you and Gertie like each other”. Then there was silence, and smiles, and expectation, and me wondering if he said what he said, wondering what they had been saying before, wondering if this was really happening. My mind froze over instantly, all concept of time and reality, gone, just silence, and nerves exploding violently, sliced into strings, strangled and twisted, anxiety tearing at the edges of my sanity, yet numbing, dull, disconnecting me from reality, like you’re not really there, it’s not really happening, rabid fear slowing down time like in the movies, processing everything too fast, bullets slowly approaching, a knife across a throat, beautiful slow spurts of blood, time stands still completely, you’re dead, there is only silence now. Silence, ever stretching stillness, silence.

His voice pierces through everything, you blink, and it all rushes back into action. Sound comes back, you can hear the engine of the bus, you can hear the other people talking around you, you can see their faces, the city moving outside the windows, your own hands, your heartbeat, all resonating in his voice, putting the moment out of its misery, “or maybe not”, and it’s too late now, you understand now, she liked you enough to set this up, she understood your shyness and your nature, she wanted to make it even easier on you than she had before, she just wanted you and you denied her. Coldly, cowardly, you ignored her, you ignored all of them as you sat and imploded on yourself, vanished into your seat, melted away into shame and misery and the first true bloomings of self hatred, the birth of a new you, a despicable creature that senses its own tragedy, its own twistedness, its own self strangling nature. 

He started talking again, but the words were a blur to you now. Background noise to your suffering, to the dull blade slowly tearing its way down you, gutting you, your bowels fall out and slide off the steps at your stop without a word spoken, you carry yourself home, you cry, you cry, you fall asleep, you wake up, you walk back to the bus stop in the morning and you sit with them again like it didn’t happen. You suppress it all again, you suffer as you were denied and as you denied out of sheer discomfort with your raw emotions, your shame, your anxiety, your insecurity, your endless sense of not belonging, you dump it into some corner of you and carry on, keep going, make it through another day. Within two weeks Gertie has a boyfriend, a tall, handsome, older boyfriend, a total piece of shit, a loser that changes her completely, ruins her, and it’s your fault, you’ve done it, you’ve ruined her, you’ve ruined everything.

It took two years for you to recover. Two years until you came back to normal, which wasn’t very normal to begin with, and allowed yourself to develop some kind of liking for a girl. You were sixteen, the age your brother was when a blonde girl started coming over to the house a lot, and you remember your mother saying he was too young for that, your old fashioned mother, the stupid old prude, the terrified woman that terrified you forever, shoving shame into your system so deep it will never get away from you, the guilt of liking a girl, you were only twelve, before you had even learned about rejection and ridicule, you were learning that it was a shame to like girls, a despicable thing for a boy to consider, to be interested in, to portray to your family, too soon at sixteen, I forever buried my likings of anyone, I knew it was shameful and wrong.

So here I was, a sixteen year old boy who liked a sixteen year old girl, summed up by the knowledge that his feelings for the girl were horrible, that he was betraying his mother, that she wouldn’t like him anyway, that she would reject him, that everyone would find out his shameful secret, everyone would laugh, everyone would know.

My best friend Jimmy found out. He had made fun of her, and in a moment of sucker instinct I had told him not to. Excitement flushed his face. “You like her!”. He laughed at me. He had an obnoxious laugh. An arrogant, condescending laugh that divided right and wrong, judging all. I liked her anyway. She became the next Gertie. We became friends, we walked to the bus stop together, I liked her, and I had learned now that I needed to let her know this. I hadn’t learned much. I thought it would be a good idea to write a letter. Stupid kid. I wrote her a letter, put it in an envelope, and rode my bike to her town, a town over, an hour away by bike, probably more, with a map in my pocket, finding my way to her home. She was the new Kate. Except I had a letter that I was holding in a trembling hand, staring at the house in the darkness, terrified, veins bursting, heart pumping furiously, I dropped it in the slot and biked away as fast as I could. Sweating in the cold, mad with adrenaline, I pedaled my way home thinking only of how I had done it, I had broken the rules, I had told a girl that I liked her, I felt free, closer to human, closer to someone I wanted to be. I didn’t even care if she liked me or not.

Her name was Trudie, and she didn’t show up the next day. It was a blur. So was the weekend. So was monday. I had waited until the end of the school year to tell her. Because I didn’t want to have to miss her all summer, but mostly because I didn’t want to suffer through a whole semester of rejection. I didn’t see Trudie until the last day of school. I was standing by myself and saw her walk over. “I got your letter. I’m sorry, but… no”.

She walked away. I started crying. I think that was the last time I ever thought a girl would like me. It was never the same after that. It broke me. After that, it was me deliberately setting myself up for failure. It was awkward college experiences, odd disconnected flirting with girls I didn’t think I could get, more notes, more passing by their home, one time being invited inside a home and spending an evening of anxiety and fear and not speaking and not hearing from them again, I was a terrified young creep, a shaking mess of insecurities, a speck of suppressed nerves. There was hope and denial, there was attention from ugly girls, there was not knowing how to deal with it, there was crushing weight, there was severe problems while the entire world was partying, having a good time, living perfect lives while I was trapped inside myself, developing these awful pathways, setting myself up for a life of fear for anyone that wasn’t me, long nights alone writing in journals, taking photos of people who weren’t  looking, Kafkanian brute, hidden life, night creeper, gentle and kind soul that all the girls liked as a friend, a good guy, someone that would never hassle them, someone they could trust, older girls liked my innocence, I was terrified of them, I never kissed any of them, I could have fucked all of them, hot girls flirted, I froze, I had still not learned anything, I was a messy virgin idiot, a social wreck, an innocent bystander, observing, watching them do it, listening to them, I was twenty years old when I met the girl I married.


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