In theory, my New Year's Resolution was simple -- each and every day, I wanted to write. Months or maybe even years ago, I'd purchased a simple, leather-bound black notebook. Aside from the occasional grocery list or jotted note on something I'd like to tell my pen pal, it went largely unused.
On January 1st, 2016, that changed. I was in my room, laying on my bed with what could be described as a moderate-to-severe hangover depending on which way I turned my head, when I noticed the notebook lying close by on the floor. As deliberately as I could without making my head hurt more, I slowly picked up the book and a pen to begin writing.
I've never really been a fiction writer -- most, if not all, of the content on this blog are stories taken straight out of my awkward interactions with humans. But, one of the things I wanted to explore with this new notebook approach was writing daily about whatever was going on in my mind at that exact moment, taking vague feelings I'd had and transforming them into specific stories that could happen, but maybe haven't yet.
Some parts of the following stories are true; other parts are definitely and highly fabricated. I'm writing this as both a disclaimer that I am not as sad as these pieces may make you think and, also, so my mother doesn't die of a heart attack when she reads the sex stuff.
One of my favorite human beings (and, if our parents have their way, my future husband), Andy Meyer, is a fabulous writer. Recently, he posted a link to a poem he'd written on his Facebook page. The poem, he wrote, was "partly a reflection on personal guilt and partly a terrified cry for help from the depressive demons that live within us all."
"Of course," he said, "This poem, just like all poetry (I would claim) is a distillation of a specific feeling, so don't worry about me. I'm doing just fine!"
In the same fashion, my following pieces are not necessarily true, though the feelings are not necessarily false. They are compilations of what I've written in my alone time during the month of January, the beginning month of this resolution that I can already feel transforming me as not only a better writer, but a better person who is more in tune with my feelings and surroundings.
Most of my writing on this website is funny because I like to find the humor in the (somewhat) humiliating stories of my life. These pieces are different, though I hope you enjoy them all the same.
When I left his room for the last time, it was not the last time, but we both thought it was. It should have been -- that much is certain -- but despite our mutual and passionate dislike for each other (or, perhaps because of it), the morning I walked out of his room without even bothering to wake him up was not the last night we spent together.
Our relationship was complicated in a way it did not need to be. Years of not really being together but not necessarily being apart, both of us committing to each other and other people at opposite moments. We'd go months without talking -- we were both dating other people and having multiple serious, significant others -- yet without fail, we'd see each other at a party and spend the rest of the evening arguing loudly about what happened to us when we were just children. Most of these fights ended with us being asked to leave the area: all of them ended with us alternating between screaming and violently kissing against a wall. What should have just been a quick rebound hook up was instead transformed into an epic drama spanning the majority of my college career.
Sometimes, I think back to that night -- the night we both thought it was going to end. My memories from it are clear and I am confident we were not physically engaged. I don't even think we really talked. Maybe we just wanted to lay together one last time, to feel what could have been when we were nineteen and he was more serious about me than I was about anything.
We would have made a terrible couple. We thrived on the back-and-forth of our relationship -- who could care less, who could hurt the other one more. It wasn't always like that, though. There were nights when we were tiny, when our friendship was slowly forming, as we'd lay under the stars on my back porch, giggle quietly in his room, bring gifts to each other at work, starting the beginning of something that could have been beautiful.
Maybe that's why we needed that night -- the last night. We didn't hook up because we needed that innocence, that fresh reminder of what we used to be before we became the people yelling at parties, pushing each other and violently trying to verbalize how hurt we'd become, how much we had changed.
I always tell people that when he kissed me for the first time, it was amazing, but truthfully -- I don't remember. I do remember the anticipation of getting to kiss him, though. I'd thought about him all summer, ever since the night we'd met with the stupid shirt and the sticky fingers and the strawberry vodka.
Maybe the only reason I wanted him was because I couldn't have him. In multiple senses, he and I were unavailable to each other and maybe that's why I thought about him constantly, even when I was living with someone else, even as I was promising the rest of my life to another person.
I don't think I lied when I told that other person I would marry him -- I would have -- but I wouldn't have been able to spend my life with him. I knew that even though I was young, but I confirmed it that first night back, when we were reunited for the first time since the stupid shirt and the sticky fingers and the strawberry vodka, when he touched my elbow in the August heat.
I don't remember our first kiss, but I'll never forget that feeling of completeness as he grabbed my arm.
Almost as quickly as we started, we were over. I knew it was over before he did and ended it before he could. On that night, as I faced him and told him we should just be friends, I know I was hoping for a fight, but was not surprised when I instead received that vacant stare.
I was surprised at how fast that feeling of completeness had left me.
I got over him or tried to get over him as best as I could. I threw myself into situations I'd never even deemed imaginable, situations I didn't believe were harmful, but now see were dangerous in a way that's indescribable.
After him -- after the pills and the scares and the realization that my life could change so drastically fast -- I didn't get out of bed for a week. Dealing with the aftermath of my choices, our choices, destroyed me in a way I'm not sure I'll ever be able to disassociate from him.
And, what haunted me the most is that he was gone.
Really, he'd never been there before anyway.
"How is your morning going, Miss?," my driver asked me as I stepped into his car. Blankly, I stared at both him and my tired reflection in his rearview mirror.
I wanted to yell, "Look at me! I'm very clearly in last night's clothes, wearing smeared make-up and smelling vaguely of sex and someone else's body -- how do you THINK my morning is going?"
Instead, I shut my eyes and said I was fine, breathing in-and-out slowly while replaying the night before like a movie in my mind, starting from the moment I walked in the room and saw his slow smile as we looked at each other through the glass, the "Hey, Baby," that formed on his lips as I came inside.
There are many, many things about him that should make me not want to be with him. There is, of course, the lack of communication, but there's also the incompatibility of our schedules, the life choices he makes that differ so heavily from mine, his blatant disregard for my time. Still, I melt all that away when I see him, a bizarre concept for me and my heavily calculated mind to grasp.
The night before, I was taking my shoes off on his bed when I found the drugs... five tiny plastic baggies filled with a medley of pills. Fingering them, I sighed out loud, then internally asked myself why I was there, why I'd again found myself awake in his apartment at six in the morning.
Within seconds, I had my answer. He was there, pushing me down on the bed, my hands wrapped in his hair, his head between my legs. When he went inside me, I grasped onto him as hard as I could and, when we came, I cried -- not because of the pain I dully feel when I think of my confused obsession with him, but because I am genuinely afraid to lose him...
...though, technically, he is not mine to begin with.
Waking up in the mornings with him is physically perfect and emotionally painful. The way he uncurls me from his sheets, then wraps his body around mine is everything I could want, but when he turns around in his sleep and I am left staring at his back, at the crease of his naked spine, I want him in a way I will never be able to have, in a way he will never want me.
"How is your morning going, Miss?," my driver asks and, from behind my closed eyes, the tears slowly start to form.