The first time

It's hot, it's always hot and sticky on nights of any importance.  Or maybe that's just how this emotion feels, hot and sticky with desire and need.  The bar was loud and smoky and perfect.  My hair is large and out of control, there is no amount of pomatum that can smooth it into the waves.  The are are  moments here, in this place, in between the overly false exuberance and sweat and dancing that I am finally LIVING.  There are moments when the demons are asleep.
***
She's at the bar, and she's the only one who has any truth to her.  She's not pretty, not really.  Her hair is too big and her face is too-well nothing.  It's unremarkable.  She'll probably have that face, looking just the same until she's an old woman.  She's leaning into the music in her chair, not really dancing but leaning all the way in.  I think, finally, it's time.  She's worth it.
***
There is a man at the end of the bar.  He's awkward, and he's watching me.  It's wonderful to be noticed, so I take extreme pleasure at being creeped out. He looks like he's never been out of the advanced mathematics field in his life.  Maybe, for him, I can be the glamazon the world thinks I should be.  I let my fingers trace the mouth of my glass beer bottle, slowly.  Maybe it doesn't look sexy.  Probably it looks ridiculous.  But he's watching. I lean into the bar, thrusting my breasts toward the ceiling in a ridiculously feminized motion, laughing at nothing when the bartender glances over.  Now I know I look ridiculous.
***
She's playing to me, I can tell.  She's arching her back and letting her too-big hair skim down the back of her neck.  This is my moment, if I don't look like a total nerd this could be it.  I put my glass down a little too hard and the water with lemon that I ordered earlier spills down the side.  It might not be liquid courage, but somehow she beckoning to me without even looking at this end of the bar.  I can feel my throat constrict, I'm sure my nerves are showing in my adams apple.  I don't plan what I'm doing and all of a sudden I'm in front of her and she's looking up at me, waiting for me to speak.
***
"Buy you a drink?"  He's forgotten to say the whole sentence out loud.  He doesn't know how to get the bartender's attention, that much is obvious.  I order two whiskey sours.  I'm not drinking alone.  My world is suddenly bright and shining, and he's lost all his awkward tendancies.  He's Cary Grant, or Clark Gable, or Humphry Bogart.  Electrified, I take his hand.
"Dance," I whisper shout in his ear but I don't have to explain, because we're already halfway to the dance floor.
***
She's become beautiful.  She's not a good dancer but she thinks she is, and the whiskey is making me realize that I don't need to worry, this is something I'm good at.   I'm good at women.  We're spinning and I'm trying to catch the rhythm of her hips but it keeps changing as she rolls and dips with this song that I know.  Everyone is watching her and I don't mind, because they're watch me too.  Her glory enfolds me and then we are both beautiful.  She is the one, this is what I've been waiting for for since I discovered myself in my mother's basement.
***
I think it would be delightful to take him home.  I'm not a predator, but he looks like he needs kind word and a kinder hand, and I can give him those things.  I've never done this before-taking a man to bed without knowing his name-but it looks to me as if he's never been to bed with a woman so I guess we're even.  It's my good deed for the night, and I'll wake up tomorrow morning to revel in the guilt and the shame of it all.  We're walking back up the long hill to my house and he is holding my hand.  The bar was delightfully warm and throbbing and now this air is perfectly freezing.  I need this.  I pull him under a street lamp and when we kiss for the first time, I feel every muscle of his body giving in.  He is mine.
***
She's beautiful still, standing on the grey-brown linoleum of the mid-century house that she must call home.  Her jacket is thrown carelessly on the table piled with old bills and the everyday detritus of pockets.  My hands are on her, grabbing her hips, pulling them into mine.  When she kisses me it's sour, hinting of the beer she had abandoned in favor of something stronger.  We stand there, clutching each other, willing our bodies together through the protective layers of clothing.
"Come with me."  It's whispered in my ear and it's too cheesy to be sexy, but it's sweet.  She's pulling me into the bedroom that must lie deeper in the house, but I can't help myself as a I slow down.
"I've never done this before."  I'm talking to my shoes, but she answers.
"I know.  I'll teach you."
I know she will.
***
He's on the bed and straining, he can't get his belt off and his hands are shaking.  He doesn't want to pull his pants all the way off for some reason, but he's fumbling with his boxer shorts beneath as if with  enough willpower they will just disappear.  He's awkward again, not a black and white movie star.  I can feel the self loathing creeping back and I will it to stay away for just a few moments more.  I prop myself up on my elbows, thrusting my chest toward him in what I'm sure is a ludicrous pose.  It works.  He stops fumbling and looks at me.  Then, he reaches into his pocket.  Good, he's brought protection- that saves me an uncomfortable search through the dark.
***
She is here and I am ready.  She's leaning up into me, and I know I can't resists much longer or the moment will be lost-I'll explode all over her bedroom and wouldn't that be a scene for her roommates to find.  I look down at her and she looks up into my eyes, greedily.  Pulling her face into my neck, she nuzzles my ear and whispers,
"Hey, You're amazing!"
It's time.  My pocket is empty, but my hand is full.  As the knife slides between her ribs she looks momentarily ecstatic, then confused.  She dies without fanfair.
She's the one.
She's mine.
My first time.

Feelings of yesterday

How does it feel now?
I was at your wedding you know, the first time he tore my heart out. Thinking about that night still makes me sick. I knew it was wrong, all wrong, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe the truth of my life- not for years. You laugh, you and the rest of everyone who said I should know better. At 19, my virginal heart should have known better according to you.

So how does it feel?
It hurts, sure. You thought you built a future, and when you realized you were the only one with bricks and cement it was too late. I know how it goes, you spent moths thinking

“But it couldn’t happen to me!”
Oh but darling, it can.

The embarrassment it will fade, as you settle into your new place in society. You will define yourself on your own terms, because unlike the others (the ones you tortured) it couldn’t be YOUR fault, could it??

But here’s the secret, darling:
I’ve known since the very beginning. But why listen to me? I dated a whore, my woes is inherently flawed. I hope you enjoy the heartbreak, darling.
I did.

Don't (The man in green)

I have dreamed about you three times in the last three days, each time with increasing detail.  It's so real that when I wake up I have a sense of peace, a feeling of having it all figured out.  You're there and somehow everything makes sense.  And then I open my eyes and reality creeps back in along with it's favorite bedfellows, uncertainty and guilt. 

WHY.  Why are you in my head, in my heart.  I have spent the last decade of my life asking myself this question (Yes, it's been ten years of this.)  I have had a slew of bad relationships, a few golden moments with men who could have otherwise been THE ONE.  And now, I feel myself sliding towards the end of another greeted by the familiar harbinger of relationship death: dreams of you. 

Except, this time it's not so simple.  This time he's good and kind and we have built a life together.  This time, it's my fault and I must be the cruel one in order to break it off.  And if I don't?  If I keep living this fairy tale lie and escaping every evening to waltz with you through my dreams, am I still at fault?  The passion, the yearning that I have to be around you, to speak to you, feel your fingers on my skin: it's like nothing I've ever found before or since. 

Have you been dreaming about me, too?  Is this the universe in on some cosmic joke against us both?  Perhaps, in another world and another life we found each other at the right moment and things were different.  Perhaps, the world is truly trying to tell us something.  Or maybe, it's just me.  Pathetically holding on after a decade to what could have been my first love.  I gave my heart as if it was, and maybe it's not so easy to get back something so rashly given. 

In the end, I hope I'm not alone.  I hope that you're in this torture too.  If you are, please tell me so that I might end this for both of us, finally take a leap of faith and pick up the phone to call.  And if not, well darling, I'll see you in my dreams. 

When the gunman comes for me

It’s 2016 and I could be next.  There are shootings, bomb threats, violence on every corner, human against human, man against woman against child against the world.  My job has become dangerous, going out at night could be lethal; people die at grocery stores in the morning and at bars at night.  And that’s just in Williamsburg. 

I ask myself almost daily if all this risk is worth it.  I’m not negotiating peace treaties in a war torn province or doing humane work for the United Nations.  I’m talking about our history.  It’s not even my families, like millions of other Americans, my roots in this country are barely a century old.  I’m talking about people that I have no real reason to defend, no tangible connection to.  Except that they’re human, and so am I.  They are our past, our present, and our future. 

Every time I hear of another shooting, I wonder if this is what it felt with stamp act riots rippling up and down the east coast.  If citizens lived in fear of being dragged out of their beds just for looking the wrong way, saying the wrong thing, being on the wrong side.  This is not a new struggle, the idea of “national identity” is  contrived out of nothingness.  And isn’t that the beauty of it?

So If I’m next.  If the gunman comes for me and I can’t run or hide, for the love of god don’t send prayers.  I’m not a saint.  I’m not a martyr.  I lie and I am vain and filled with human foibles.  Don’t make it a call to action; don’t put up ridiculous black and whites of my vacant smile (but in all honesty, choose a flattering photo.)  Don’t talk about my childhood dreams or how I was going to save the world.  The world cannot be saved by the countless innocent lives snuffed to soon. 

Instead, listen.  We are bothers and sisters, black and white, brown and red and every color in between.  There are so many good sane people in the world, we cannot be held hostage by the violent few.  I am living my life to the greatest purpose I can imagine.  I am trying to connect the past to the present, to learn from our wounds instead of just picking at the scab until it becomes infected.  If I’m next, I want it to count for something. 

Make me count. 

I want to believe it's cold in my memory, but in reality it was nearly eighty.

Pitch black- I've closed the store again and an hour past midnight I'm finally speeding towards home.  Just stay away- my silent prayer.  Don't let me have persevered to die here, on the side of the road mangled into the white sheet metal of my brand new Corolla.
The phone rings five times before you answer.  A month ago, it would have been once.  Six weeks ago and you would already have sent me five concerned messages.  I would have yelled at you, don't you understand that ever one costs me three quarters?  How things have changed.
 When I hear your voice it sends such a shock of relief through my body that I let out the breath I don't realize I've been holding too fast and my first word is lost.
"Hmm?"
"Hey, I love you."
"Mhhm."

Clickity click click.  They keyboard is the giveaway of what I have known since the third ring.  Distantly I can hear the other people, the headset that you won't-can't? take off.  And so, I try to talk.  I don't know how to do this.  I've never had a boyfriend before and then you, you called me a goddess.  You told me I'm beautiful.  You chased me.  The first one, only one to do so.  Though the whole conversation I get five words, maybe six.  Forty five minutes later and the silence stretches into endless tears.  You don't hear, or you don't care.  Probably both.  I try again.

"Let's play our game....I'll ask you a question but you have to answer truthfully.  No lies."
"Sure."
"Most embarrassing high school moment?"
"I don't have one."
"First kiss?"
"I told you that already."
"If you could be anything in the world, what would you be?"
"I don't know.  Hey Prot, I need heals!"

Just like that, I'm shut out.

Did you know then, I wonder.  Did you have any idea that I was taking every nice thing you said, locking it into a box deep in the back of my mind for the days when there was nothing left to say.  Were you already propositioning them, in between sending my pictures as bragging rights?

I wanted to give you the world.  You handed it back to me.  Literally.  The plastic globe that I had spent six months searching for, you put it right back in my hands.

So instead, I locked away my love.  I learned to apologize for your shortcomings.  I learned the art of fear.  Of my own worthlessness.  Meanwhile,  I gave everything I had.  I love you, without fear or distrust.  In a way that I never will be able to again.  I took care of your dog.  I loved him as my own.  I went to the hospital with your sister when she had her child.

And I learned to write murder stories.  I learned it was safer not to say things out loud.

Until you found this.  I won't make that mistake again.

Now I love cautiously.  I apologize too easily.  I don't make decisions for fear that I will make the wrong one.  I look for violence and fear and I'm surprised when I'm met with love and a gentle hand.

You told me sex was better when I'm scared.  Better when I'm hurting and crying.

You made me believe that was the only way.

Some days, I can still hear your voice, still see the crooked tattoo on your shoulder blade.  You will not be my nightmare.  I banish you.

Mr. F

I know, somewhere here buried in years of memories I have described with fresh eyes what it felt like to run slipping and sliding back from that house.  I'm sure that everything seemed so brilliantly clear, but now the edges have faded.  You're still tall, I think, with brown hair and brown-maybe hazel eyes.  I'm perpetually wearing what I think is a green tank top with horribly unflattering skinny jeans.  I remember you trying to take them off, and me fighting equally hard to keep them on.
"No," I said, "No." And you stopped, wait- did you?  Or were you one of the persistent ones that I could only fight off through feigned sleep?  I can't recall.  All I know is that at an ungodly hour of the morning the next day I'm slipping and sliding my way back across campus, the guilt heavy in my stomach.
"You only kissed," I tell myself,
"No big thing.  Not any big thing."
But it is a big thing, because if she kissed Tim, I don't know what I would do.  Murder her, or myself.
And what comes next?  I can remember waiting to try to find the right way to say it-but also knowing that inaction would result in someone else telling her what I can't seem to find the words to say. Did I tell her?  Or did someone else?  I don't know.  All I remember is a coldness.  That's why I lost my last true bit of friendship, I think.  And it was all my fault, even through my rum filled haze.

And now, where is she?  Not talking to me, or anyone else for that matter.  Quirky etsy shop shut down, no more Alison Sudol songs to sing together.  But, I've seen the pictures.  Beautiful brown haired baby boy, perfection.  Something I'm afraid I may never have.  She was, is, everything I've ever wanted to be.  And there she is, *poof!* gone.  I remember the day she came over to my room, a stack of vogues, and collaged words onto the dorm wall.

"I believe."

From that point on, whenever I opened the door those words fluttered up and then landed steadfastly in place again.  Words to live by.  Words to leave by.  And so I packed up and went, because I felt dirty.  She was the one person who never said those things about me, not that I knew of: but she's the only one who had a right to.

For years, I've repeated that mantra whenever I have the misfortune to think of that night.
"It was only a kiss.  They weren't even dating.  It was no big thing."

My Dear Mr. Felix, why couldn't you leave it at that?

Once upon a time, she read everything I wrote.  And now I know these words will fall upon blind eyes.

Oh my darling, if I could only tell you, redeem a bit of myself.

If only.

Nineteen again

It's two o'clock.  I got out of bed, half an hour ago, forced myself to put jeans on and now I'm under the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the campus center.  Paper take-out box in hand, I'm sluggishly moving towards my mailbox, a secret part of me hoping that I'll find something there to relieve my latest slump; a letter, a message, anything.  I've been this way for a week.  Ever since I heard the latest rumors, ever since I realized the people who I thought were my closest confidants were anything but.

I'm a slut, they say.  I'll sleep with anything that moves.
It's fine.  I had never kissed a guy until last fall, but it's fine.
I don't know how to react when boys try to take my clothes off, but it's fine.
If you say I'm a slut, then for all intents and purposes, I am.
I don't care.  Much.

I see someone who I don't think despises me yet, at least not that I know of.  She's sweet, really.  We don't travel in the same circles but I can't take any more of what I've been enduring from my confidants this last week.  And she knows him.  That person that makes me forget what the others are saying about me.  When I'm with him, I feel as though I never left the island.  I feel silly, but not in the cheek-burning embarrassing way that I've felt in the recent days; simply naive and innocent and full of delicious unknowing excitement.  He's sweet to me.  I feel so beautiful when I'm around him.

She smiles and waves, and I pause, resting at one of the high tables outside the bookstore to chat.
"So, I have something to ask you."
My stomach drops.  Those four words, I've learned to dread them.  Used to be, my friends back home would ask me if I'd seen the new period drama on PBS, or if I was going to go out for the spring play.  Here, they were the harbinger of another malicious rumor.
"Are you sleeping with Tim?"
And there it is.  Looking at her face, I try to decide how to react, what to say- how to avoid more painful embarrassment.  I can't tell her how I feel.  Naive as I am, I can see that to answer in the affirmative is to confirm every rude suspicion about me.  I stumble, unsure.
"I mean, I'm seeing him, but we haven't...It's not a big deal.  We hang out sometimes, I guess.  It's not any serious thing."  I can tell that I've said all the wrong things instantly, but I don't know how to fix it.  I just want to drop my sandwich and shout to the whole world, I don't know how to date.  Boys don't like me, they just don't.  I'm the sidekick, the afterthought, the one who has to ask a sophomore to her prom because everyone else is taken.  Instead I say,
"Why?"
"Well, some of the rugby girls were talking about you.  They seriously hate you."
I mentally run through images of people in my head.  I've seen them pop up on facebook, but have I ever had a face to face meeting with one of them?  I don't think so...
"I wouldn't recommend coming around the rugby house anytime soon."
Like I would.  Like I know anyone to go to a party with, other than the people on my hall.  Even they don't invite me to things anymore.  In that second, I hate her.  I know she's trying to be kind, but I hate everything from her curly hair to her perfectly off-brand shoes.  But, I do my best.  I try to smile.  I try to blow the whole thing over.
"It's really not a thing."  I stayed up until midnight in his room last night.  I woke up when he had to go to class this morning. 
"We barely know each other." I fell so hard for him almost a year ago.  I didn't know it was possible to feel this way around another human being.
She looks at me, pitying.  I never learned to hide emotions, I never had to before.
"Well, you should know...he has a girlfriend."

Just like that and I can't feel my toes anymore.  My stomach has turned into a giant pit.  I have to stop myself from reaching up and brushing the spot on the my neck where he kissed me last night.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah.  She's abroad for the semester, but she'll be back in the spring."

I don't know what I say after that, all I know is that before I know it I'm back in my room and I'm broken.  So completely broken.  Somehow, after the beginning, I began to expect betrayal from everyone else in my life.  But not him.  Some distant part of me knows that I have hidden this possibility, this reality from the part of my brain that makes sense.  But now I can't ignore it anymore.  Before him, I had only ever been kissed once, in the hallway in my freshman dorm, by someone I didn't know how to say no to.  He is the first person that I have ever wanted to be with that seemed like they might value my company, my beauty, be willing to overlook my awkward lack of carnal knowledge. And just like everything else, this too is a lie.

A part of me died that day.  Since then, my trust has been giving sparingly.  Yes, we talked, and you claimed to have been honest about it the whole time.  But we both know, neither of us was totally honest; we both benefited from leaving some things unsaid.

I have written a million times over the first time I slept with you.  But here's the thing.  The hurt, the anger, it started not on that day in the spring, but on a november day months before.  You ask me why I haven't waited.  I'm scared, still.  I know what it feels like to be discarded, to be second best to you.  After that day, I took what I could get; it just so happens that the person who came next taught me the art of self loathing.

It's been eight long years, and I'm a very different woman now.  I'll never have that innocence back, and I'm not sure I would want it if I could.  I've grown, and I'm grateful for the lessons that I've learned.  I've moved on, you won't believe that from this account, but I really have.  I don't place people on pedestals the way I once did with you.

But then, we talk.  You make me laugh.  All of a sudden I feel breathless again.  And then I realize.

You're drunk.  You drink and you text me and then when you're sober you don't respond.

And somehow, I'm nineteen again, hoping against hope that you'll be drunk enough to want me upstairs, but not so drunk that you forget you invited me there in the morning.  Because when you're sober, you don't seem to want to talk to me.  But when you're drunk, you're angry that I've not waited.  I can't do this anymore.  Because in those moments, I'm staring into her eyes and she's telling me all over again,
"Well, you should know...he has a girlfriend."

And once again, for a millisecond, I'm broken.

In the last two weeks, I've had seven different people ask me out.  I've told them no.  I've made myself wait.  The one time I did go out, it was horrid.
I've said no to the Marquis de Lafayette, to other people that I work with, people I share my passion with.  I don't date where I work, I tell myself.  But then again, when a friend of a friend asks me, the answer stays the same.

Why?  Why after all this time and I still waiting for you, someone who has always seemed to have the luxury of time?

I want to say fuck it, I'm moving on.  But the last time I tried, I came right back to where I started three years later.

The whole point of this blog was that the people who mattered never had the chance to read it.  I'm not sure that that's still true, but I don't care anymore.  Maybe it's the wine, but I'm so jumbled right now that for the first time in ages I don't know where nineteen year old Emily stops and twenty-six year old Emily begins.

I care about you.  So much that it hurts.  If that's a thing that can't be reconciled, for God's sake let me go.  And even if not, there is no guarantee that this won't all still go up in flames. I'm not counting on anything.  But my mind hurts, and I need some answers.

Tomorrow, I'm going to do with this what I've done with countless entries before and turn it back into a draft.  It will go in my file of writing that's at times too painful for me to read.  You'll probably never see in, which all in all is a good thing.  Even if you did, it wouldn't change the state of things at all.

So here, and now I can say it.  My God, you make me feel alive.  You make my soul sing.  It's unlike anything else I've ever known, and it's addictive.  Please, be kind to me.  Please.