a boy with a shaved head, a cheap watermelon vape, a father with fickle fists. my cherry blossom button up, coppery snakes of hair brushing the indent of my waist, i was his antithesis. my love for him was a performance, an exhibition of my stubborn contrarianism and his youthful desperation. when he kissed me i closed my eyes and pictured the girl who played bass. i still see him, but now we pass a mahogany pipe around circles of unconventional characters, appreciative of each other's good company, yet mutually satisfied with nothing more. i love him, i do, i do, the same way i love rain against my window at 10 pm, the way i love the morning walk to the bus stop. to me, he is a keepsake of the headstrong teenage girl i used to be. he is strong, somehow managing to retain the human birth right to tenderness even through all the chalky bedside table lines, the wanton persecution and a childhood overflowing with every invitation to cognitive corruption. he is my friend, i love him.
a girl who played bass. my first kiss, my first real love. she was seashells, warm summer evenings. she wore a silver peace sign around her neck, never took it off. we were only 15, and oh, how i loved her. she sang in a band, and she was incredible, prodigal. every time she spoke, i could hear the profound melodies brewing in her throat. burned into my mind is the memory of us sitting in the school band room while she crooned radiohead into a microphone. i hummed along, under my breath and out of tune. i would hang around an extra half hour after school finished so she could kiss me against a grimy bathroom wall while she was supposed to be practicing her 90's guitar riffs. in the months after she left me, i was hollow. i was so young, i didn't know how to proceed with caution. what do you do, when you've given someone your whole self? when they have your heart in their pocket, when they up and leave without giving it back? i loved her like i had never loved anyone before. and of course, we tried again. it was summer, my skirts swirled in ocean tones around my ankles. i left her, in the end. she wasn't mine anymore. i didn't cry. now, a year later, we laugh about it all, buy each other diet coke once a week. we talk late into the night sometimes. the bitter aftertaste of nostalgia has long disappeared. the warm light of her affection does not fascinate me any longer, i am a moth only to flames of my own making. she is my friend, i love her.
a girl with blue hair, a silver nose ring, a pretty face. we met at a halloween party, in our friend's garage. we went out for a month. i remember she adored oasis, i remember she was a very sad girl. i really did try to be good, but i wasn't. all i could find in her cerulean rockpool eyes was vague affection, suppressed echoes of thom yorke's bass line lullabies. she was beautiful, so beautiful, in her own right, but i my vision was shrouded by a haze of yearning for what i had lost. she was my friend, she was not meant to be my lover. i see her sometimes, in the hallways between classes, and we smile at each other, but don't talk. i left her a november ago, i did not cry.
a girl made of stardust and unequivocal loveliness, who was shy but dazzlingly clever. she was pretty, so pretty. i badly wanted to love her- she was the sort of girl i should have adored. she was written in verse, tasted like cherries. i remember she had a document on her busted-up laptop covered in stickers, page after page of poetry i couldn't quite understand, no matter how earnestly i tried. our souls spoke in different tongues. an emotional language barrier, one i couldn't for the life of me overcome. i did like her, how could i not? she was inexplicably pleasant. it confused me and my ferocious passion. i discovered, through her and her unfaltering niceties, that i cannot force myself into indiscriminate understanding. i left her soon after i found her. i did not cry. she was sad, so sad, and the guilt of it consumed me, but i do not have the willpower to linger where i know i do not belong. time has passed, she is my friend. i love her. she is so different now- still beautiful, achingly so, but unrecognisable. she has come to know the power of pretty. there is a boy she loves, who rides a motorcycle and loves her back. now, she is bewitching, an enchantress in distressed denim and oversized t shirts that hang from her willowy form like babylon. gone is the timid flower fairy who was a question mark inscribed in shimmering coral ink in the margins of my classics notes. she is my friend, i gaze at her spellbinding smiles with loving indifference. she is my friend, i love her.
a boy with sea glass eyes. from the second i met him, i was infatuated. his quick (yet somewhat dim-witted in retrospect) humour, his reckless nights out, his slender frame and the hollows of his cheekbones. i would have given him anything he asked. i believed without a doubt that i loved him. i met him by mistake, and that same night us and an assortment of others slept awkwardly tangled up in my twin sized bed. i slept with my head on his chest, my body cramped and compressed, butterflies in my stomach while i counted his heartbeat and memorised the rhythms of his breathing. three weeks later, he kissed me in a primary school playground. i still remember it all in meticulous detail. his clumsy professions of affection that i took as gospel, the soft bite of the night air, the way my organs flipped upside down when our lips touched. for a month and a half, i was devoted to him completely. i thought the world of him. he was so casually cool, so undeniably beautiful. we spent friday nights drinking and smoking ourselves half to death, and then crashing at his best friend's house, bodies knotted together, interlocked. he would wrap his arms around me as tight as he could, as if i could have flown away. as if i would. i had the biggest crush on him. but to him, i was a metaphor. once the novelty wore off, once my tempestuous outbursts weren't exciting anymore, he was mean. once he had stripped back layers of beauty and gumption he found a storm he was not willing to brave. he made me cry, and i left him. it felt like hell. i missed him terribly. i had been heartbroken before, but this was different. i felt the pain physically, like he had ripped out my heart, gently kissed my still pulsating arteries, and haphazardly shoved it back between my blackened lungs. i went a little insane. i ripped up our pictures, i took a pair of scissors to the stickers he asked me to adorn the filthy city walls with, i lay on my bedroom floor gasping for air between sobs and dry retching over my mother's favourite stainless steel pot. i went back. of course i went back. he had made me feel like i was somebody that mattered, somebody that was beautiful and worthy of adoration, of respect, he let me believe that he loved me. it only happened twice, when alcohol had clouded his judgement enough for him to forget his inability to stomach my affections. the last time, he passed out drunk with his hands on my ass. i stayed up until the sun rose, laying on my back, and crept out the sliding door before he stirred from his stupor. my eyes stayed dry as i walked down to the bus stop. glorious indifference had overcome me, and i found my sympathy for his unfeeling apathy had run dry. we don't speak anymore. sometimes i think about him, but i don't miss him. he is not the boy with the sea glass eyes anymore. i often see him- small town, mutual friends, shared pot habits- but i don't see him. it's okay. truly, it is. i am almost grateful. i have learnt, and i will never let a person hold that much power over me again.
a boy with coal coloured curls and not much else. he was handsome, or at least tolerably so. i met him at a skate park piss up. he sat up by the water towers with me and showed me his second hand camera collection, played cheesy 80's music from his tinny phone speaker. i don't think he asked me a single question. i told him i wasn't cold but he insisted on draping his jacket around my shoulders. he was glaringly unremarkable, but i thought that was what i needed. it never crossed my mind that i could find contentment in solitude. the second time i ever saw him, he asked me to be his girlfriend with a jolly rancher and a buttercup he had picked from my neighbour's lawn. i said yes, but i didn't mean it. before he left my house, he grabbed my wrist and slid my hand down his torso and under his waistband. it was three weeks, i think, of sweaty sex and clunky small talk until i left him. the day before i told him i was done, i kissed the girl who played bass, drunk out of my mind at some party somewhere. i felt guilty, i really did, but there is a limit to how much you can feel for someone you never really knew. i haven't spoken to him since, and i never think of it. i could never love him. he was so painfully boring, and the sex was bad. oh well.
