i don't want the world, i just want your half.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Due to privacy (and this being sucktastic), editing this down to just include the stuff I actually didn't hate. I am learning that the closer you are to a situation, the harder, craft-wise and emotionally, it is to write about. That's why I like to make up my stories.

When I first met you, it wasn’t anything huge or obviously life changing like you always think it’s going to be. The phone rang. I picked it up and there you were.
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I usually went to bed at nine, but you’d soon get me to break my self-enforced bedtime by keeping me up until midnight and later. I remember when staying up until nine was a big deal, and my eyes would flick between the digital clock over the television set as it neared the hour and my dad’s face at our old house down the street. I’d hug my knees and pretend to be invisible, not looking him straight in the face, another cushion on the sagging woven couch we found on the side of the road. But as soon as Frazier came on, I knew I was caught. Some nights, though, my dad would play along, letting his gaze pass over me like he was God and I was painted with lamb’s blood, and I’d bury my face into my legs, trying to hide my triumphant grin. He wasn’t so understanding this time around. Though I didn’t really have a bedtime, he would get pissed and yell at me through the wall to go to sleep if it was past eleven. I spent a lot of time whispering on the phone in my closet that last semester.
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You called me that night to talk about Kim, my best friend since seventh grade and your kind-of girlfriend. She’s Cambodian-Chinese and had typical overly-protective-and-borderline-paranoid Asian parents who wouldn’t let her shave her legs or talk to boys or even hang out with me, come to think of it. She’d later tell me that it was because I once wore a tank top to her house. You and she would make out in the back of the band bus, holding hands through the seats, whispering back and forth about how she was going to run away one day and hop a train with you and leave it all behind, the two of you living like Christopher McCandless or Jack Kerouac, craving solitude from the world but instead finding it in each other. It was ridiculous and naïve and it wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen, or at least that’s what she’d later tell me.

You told me about all of the things I already knew, like that Kim was sneaking out of her window to run and meet you at the post office, where your sister Cassie’s live-in (and slightly gay) best friend would be waiting with his Civic with the confusing automatic seatbelts that I always somehow broke to take the two of you back to your house. You didn’t tell me about all of the things you guys did in the dark after your parents were asleep, but Kim had, and I didn’t pretend not to know. She told me all about your room, how your walls were dark red on all sides, like they were painted by a kid who just got out of a psych ward, or more likely, a bordello, and how you had a little lamp with a twisty neck that you’d position to where it shone up against the wall, setting the whole room aglow, and how you had the most comfortable bed known to man.

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He was stiffer than any teenaged boy I’d ever met. He acted like he had a family to raise, mouths to feed, or something really bad going on at home.

Kids at school would ask my friend Rachel what was with us because he wouldn’t even hold my hand in public, to which she’d reply with a straight face, “Oh them? He’s Amish, that’s all.”

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He barely spoke English and his name sounded like something you’d yell if you were falling out of an airplane, Huot. It was funnier to hear my dad say it; when I was on the phone talking to Kim one night about everything, he overheard and threw back his head and yelled “HUAAAA!” and then started laughing hysterically.

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Your house was weird and just a little too different from my normal life to know what to do with. Time seemed to stop when I was there; maybe it was because you lived so far out in the country. It was like Hammond or something, except I always knew I’d have to take those three winding county roads back into town and go back to the real world at some point.

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We went to your room to play Wii. They were still pretty new then and hard to find, so I was excited and you didn’t have many games, so we played a rendition of Duck Hunt sans the two-player controller because it was out of batteries. I slapped the ducks off of the TV screen while you followed my palms with the Wiimote and they fell, one by one, into the grass until we eventually both collapsed to your floor in laughter at the ridiculousness of it all. The dog laughed with us.
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With you it was right, but the timing was wrong.
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Your dad walked in. I think it’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen him wear a shirt.

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***

Your parents adopted me, all eighteen years of me. I slept in Cassie’s room, then in the cramped office with your old kiddie bed in it. I slowly made my way into your room, first to the floor and then to your bed, where we’d sleep crisscross, wrapped up in our own blankets, my feet by your head and your head by my feet. It wasn’t intentional, it just happened that way.

I started drinking chicory coffee and living off rice and gravy and at night we’d fall asleep, right ways up with your arm wrapped around my waist, and you’d turn me around to face you. We’d lay like that, the lamp illuminating its little corner of your desk, castings shadows onto the wall and onto us, until the record crackled and slowed to a halt, and then you’d either get up to flip it or you were already asleep, your arm now draped over me and the other thrown back over your head, mouth open and pointed skyward like a baby bird.

I always fought sleep off when I slept at your house, letting it take me in and hold me up until the point that it started to cover my consciousness like a thermal blanket, seeping in like warmth radiating off a space heater. Then I’d slowly raise up, move your arm to your side, and go back to my place at the foot of your bed, like some kind of Ruthian statement. Your parents were cool enough to let us sleep in the same room and I didn’t see any reason to push it.

Looking back, I can’t believe they let this happen at all. I don’t think I would have if I were them. Maybe they thought we should make our own mistakes.
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I was tossing something, maybe a kidney, into the bucket when something wet and sticky slapped against my face. I reached into that sacred spot, between the corner of my right eye and my nose, and pulled it off. It looked like a long white eraser, like the refills for mechanical pencils, or an ultra-slim tampon on a false-alarm day, slathered in clear white liquid.
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Seth made some comment about us all being a dysfunctional family and said he wished mommy and daddy would stop fighting and feed their kids. That got you mad at them but you laughed all the same, and soon we were yelling at them to set out the plates, make the iced tea, suddenly united against our pseudo children.

We all took our seats around the dining table. It was probably the only time it had ever been used it for its actual purpose.

“Would someone like to pray?” I asked, folding my hands in character.

“I’ll do it,” Seth said. Leave it to the atheist.

Justin grinned.

“Um. Okay.” What else was there to do but relent?

We bowed our heads.

“Dear God who I don’t believe in.” We snickered, but Seth cleared his throat. “Thank you for this food. Thank you for my fucked up pretend parents and for the duck they have provided us. And last, thank you for my stepdad Mike Painter, for picking my mom’s lazy ass off the street and giving us a nice, fancy trailer house to live in. Amen.”

“Amen,” we all repeated and began eating.
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Earlier that day we had gone to Half Price to look at comic books and instead ended up looking at Playstation 2 games upstairs. Dylan had picked one up.

“Sadie, look. San Andreas for $7.”

“So? Put it down. Let’s go.”

“It’s only seven fucking dollars. Buy it for me.”

“No. I have to pay for gas every time I come down to see you. Let’s go.”

After dinner, I was checking my e-mail and Dylan came up behind me.

“Let me check mine real quick.”

“You can’t wait just a minute?”

“No,” he said, and wheeled my chair off to the side.

He started typing in a URL. Justin and Seth came up behind us and looked at the screen and started to laugh.

I looked at the computer screen. In the address bar he had written: “www.ineedabettergirlfriendwhowillbuymesanadreasforsevendollarsgodsheisabitch.com”

I sighed.

***

Your sister still feels like my sister,
your mother still feels like my mother,
your father still feels like my father,
but you don't feel like anything at all.

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I hated memoir class. That's what it turned into, at least. Titling something "fiction projects" that you are expected to draw heavily from life experience in is entirely misleading. Next semester is short story writing. I have so many ideas and I'm so excited to write pure fiction ASDJLKAJFGKGJLSDGJ. I always thought I would want to write something kind of memoir-y but definitely not like this story. Buh. Maybe one day in novel form. And it would have to be a comedy. My family is just too weird for it not to be.

RANDOM IMAGE TIME! Actually, I found these today, so they aren't so random.

If only.


How I'll be feeling next semester.

Happy Christmas! ^__^

11:43 AM