cliché musings

I think I’m a hopeless romantic.

Not hopeless in the sense of hope (for me) is lacking. Not hopeless like consuming sighs, plucking rose petals that shrivel as they float to the ground, cutting out pictures of vintage wedding dresses and drawing squiggly white lines of glue onto a scrapbook page. Not hopeless like freefalling at 30,000 feet, watching gray clouds meet my level then pass right by me, air pulling back the skin on your cheeks, trusting that the net on the bottom is strong enough to catch me.

Hopeless like I shouldn’t have any left.

My bedroom floor was covered in plastic bins and reusable bags. Sleeves of my shirts and dresses stuck out from under the lids, books and letters and pens and things I probably didn’t need any more packed away in whatever space I could find—an unsolved Rubix cube, a puzzle that was never opened, the stress ball painted with the Captain America shield he gave me.

“In case you get nervous on your first day,” he had said to me.

I held it, squeezed it, looked back at him. “I’m just gonna be tired.”

“Take it anyway.”

The internship was almost over now, school was about to start, I was moving thirty minutes away, and he was standing in the middle of plastic bins and bags, not carrying any of them, holding a water bottle and peering down at the cap.

“Do you have tacks?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, automatically. Then thought about it. “Why?”

“Where are they?”

He was supposed to be bringing bags to my car. Not a single one had moved from where I threw them all earlier. I had to be up early the next morning, for when my mom came to take everything that couldn’t fit in my hatchback, and I was still waiting for when we could go back to his place for the night, when I could pull blankets that weren’t my own under my chin and lay into his shoulder and fall asleep to his favorite show.

I could have done anything he asked.

I dug around in the bag I threw all my desk supplies in, pulling out a white tack. He took it and started stabbing the cap of the water bottle.

Shit.

“You are not.”

He held the bottle out. “Don’t come close. I have a weapon.”

I came close. I was already laughing. “Wait—”

A crunch of plastic. Droplets squirted onto my face and pajamas. I wiped them across my cheek, like my war paint was smudged black down my skin.

After that was a sequence of steps forward and back, water spraying like a gardening hose and soaking my fuzzy sweatpants and cotton shirt, hands reaching out to grab the bottle before a pool started to form on my tiled floor. The water splashed on the ground and mixed with the dirt on our bare feet.

Eventually I gave up. The ends of my hair were dripping, my cheeks wet like I had been crying. “Can I see the bottle, though? I’m thirsty.”

He refused to hand it to me. “Open your mouth.”

I stood there with my head tilted back, letting him push out water through the tiny holes until my mouth was full.

I didn’t swallow.

“Don’t you fucking dare.”

He moved before I could aim, rushing behind me and holding onto my waist. I could feel myself giggling behind my puffed cheeks, strands of water falling down my chin.

“You better not.”

His grip was strong, warm, unrelenting against his front. I couldn’t remember another time I tried to get out of it. 

Let go before it goes everywhere, I wanted to say. I doubled over in my efforts to break free, bursts of laughter stuck in my chest.

“I’m gonna let go,” he said. “Don’t do it.”

I nodded. His arms dropped from my side and he stepped into my peripheral. I turned, and spit the water out of my mouth. A long spray, a full two feet in front of me.

It missed.

I fell to the floor laughing. Over the sound of his cackles behind me, I thought I’ve never felt like this. Enlightened. Chaotic. An energy I could feel swimming its way through my nervous system and churning a tide in my stomach. 

He said he had a place he wanted to show me.

It was a twenty minute drive out of town, past the neighborhoods and shopping centers and in between the lake that separates two dimensions, where I was then and the rest of my life I pretended no longer existed, not as important as car rides and starry nights and sleeping on the couch just to be closer. We played music over the speakers, songs on my playlist he listened to and found hilarious and wanted to hear over and over. Even the love song, the one that declared this is really lit, sis, was a joke. Maybe. He still looked at me while trying to learn every lyric.

We both knew. Not just knew, like we could sense, like the strings of tight tension could be plucked in the air and played like a harp, materializing notes in the atmosphere’s sheet of music (but we could do that, too). Knew like we had talked, just a few days before. And nothing was going to happen because it shouldn’t. It was too soon. 

I parked in a gravel lot outside a woody trail, blocked by bending trees and a board with illustrated animals the lake was host to. He told me to follow the trail and walked behind me, pushing me to keep going through the bridge attached to a water gate, leading out to a stream covered in islands of moss and leaves. The trail turned to a stone ledge, covered in scattered graffiti, no railing between the ground and the water, and then an overlook, a small, rectangular patch across from a man-made waterfall.

The view was clear, expanding, stretching the limits of my peripheral vision. The waterfall wasn’t large, a straight line that cut across the lake, but the orange and pink of the setting sun reflected off of the rushing water and damp rocks and stray logs making a trip down the current. On the other side, the lake wound into a bend, bracketed by two sides of dense trees. The water glistened, bursts of sparkles like a sky of constellations, Orion and Cassiopeia and The Big Dipper trapped in droplets until the sun was to finally hit the horizon.

“It’s so pretty,” I said.

I remember making myself look like comical awe. Wide eyes, open mouth, arms open, spinning around and pointing at the land on the other side. I wanted him to know. No one else had ever made me feel like my body had separated, an apparition of my soul standing on the sidelines, a bag of popcorn and soda in hand, watching a movie orchestrated for tugging on the heartstrings. The apparition smiled and threw a couple kernels in their mouth.

He pointed at a branch drifting toward the waterfall. “How much do you wanna bet it’s gonna get stuck?”

Its larger sibling was stranded at the top of the waterfall, nudged forward by the current but trapped by the shallow water.

“It’s gonna make it over,” I said. “I believe in it.”

“There’s no way. Watch.”

I always rooted for the underdog. I wasn’t surprised when the branch slid closer and closer to the edge, only to stop right before the drop.

“See?”

“What are you talking about? It made it over.”

He laughed. I thought about jumping off the ledge. Saying fuck it, taking off my clothes, covering myself in murky lake water and letting it consume my organs to the brim, popping back up to the surface, burning my skin with oxygen, just to ask, well, aren’t you coming?

I wasn’t scared to send myself over a waterfall.

I wish someone told me what it felt like to really like someone. Not to convince yourself that you do, or to enjoy their company, or even get along with them enough that maybe you could spend all your time with them. But to feel it, and to feel it before you can give it a name. To smile to yourself when you get to see them, the excitement when they ask to see you, when you don’t expect it, when your leg and fingers shake and all the colors around them seem to pop, a little more vibrant and you can’t look away because the kaleidoscope is changing and twisting and hypnotizing and it only turns when your energy is sucked in too, when they make you laugh like it was excavated from your throat, every last drop, when getting them to laugh sends you into the Earth’s orbit, rockets attached to your feet, and you can’t possibly freefall when you’re this high up, when they lay next to you and you don’t dare move closer, you don’t know what’s allowed, but you hope their hands brush against yours anyway, when you feel a tightness pull and pull and pull to be right there, even though there’s every reason not to be, when you hate your name but something thrills you when it leaves their lips.

It would be impossible to leave. I knew my soul would dry up, malnourished and gaunt, with the absence of its will. Now, the garden was full, a serene escape, green as emeralds carved out from the deepest cave, blossoming bushes with fruit bigger and brighter than planets in the solar system, and a waterfall right in the middle. 

I’m bad at taking hits.

My first puff of a bowl had me sputtering and scrambling to roll down the window of my friend’s Honda Accord. Spit dribbled down my chin, lungs burning red and itching to escape my chest.

My ex wanted to show me how to take from a bong. I suppose it was his way of sharing interests; that was all he did anyway. He lit the bowl and held the glass pin to my lips. I breathed in and he didn’t tell me to stop, until I pulled my face away and bent over coughing, swirls of smoke escaping with each desperate gasp of breath. He asked if I was okay. I shook my head, and when I opened my mouth only a wheezed suction of air came through. I typed into my phone, i cant talk. My fingers trembled.

When he wrapped his arms around me, let me cough into his shoulder and attempt to breathe through his shirt while tears soaked the fabric, I only felt more suffocated.

But I can remember the first time he—not ex-he, the other he—touched me. He taught my ex how to hit a bong but he didn’t smoke the bud anymore, buying new Delta 8 disposables every couple of days. I had learned by now the coughing was inevitable. Even after months of having my own cart, I could only pull for three seconds before it was too much.

I sat next to him on his bed. He passed me his pen, like he always did, and I coughed until I gagged out nothing but empty air, like I always did.

I felt a hand, this time, on my back, coming to rest in between my shoulders. Light pats on my spine, vibrations that shot across my arms and down to my legs and toes.

I looked at him, still coughing into my arm. He looked back at me. He had one arm behind him, holding himself up on the pillows, the other arm on me. On me. His face was neutral, or maybe uncertain, or maybe he was focused on not glancing at his hand. I’m sure I failed at that one.

The patting stopped. Wait—

“You good?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

He said he wanted to take a break.

“I’m not saying it’s forever.” I couldn’t look at him while he talked. I stared out the windshield, the same windshield I stared out of while telling him I kind of liked him. “I just need to focus on myself right now, get my life sorted out.”

I knew it would happen. I could always tell.

I sobbed in the parking lot after he left.

I wish someone told me what it felt like to lose the person who meant the most to you. Maybe not lose, but to both be leaning over the cliff, so close to the edge your toes curl around the ridge of the stone, peering down at angry waves smacking into the side, rocks rising from the surface of the water and pointing up and up and up waiting for you to slide your insides onto their blade, to grip their arm and clench your fingers into their flesh, to try and take a step back only to stumble, foot catching in a crevice, holding onto your person, to keep them with you, keeping yourself steady only to send their legs tripping over themselves, scraping against the edge, blood staining the stone, collapsing down and down and down until your one hand is their only hope, holding them over the ledge. You don’t know if you’re strong enough.

Maybe you should let go.

I’d look for his gaze in every interaction, could hear the crack in my chest when he didn’t meet it, but could so, so easily mend itself, one heartbeat of recovery, when he did. I could feel the weight missing from my arm, my shoulder, my back, my hand on the days he didn’t want to touch me, but wanted more, wanted to melt his skin into my blood and veins, everytime he did. I was shedding pieces of myself, a strand of hair, a fingernail, the tips of my toes, my nose, the skin of my tattoos, my own organ carved out myself. I wanted him to notice, to see the carbon copy I left for him, at his place, in his bed, in his eyes, just for him. Until there was nothing remaining. I couldn’t stop then, either. 

Not forever. He told me this might happen. I really want this to work out. He still wanted to be friends. I could still talk to him. I want a relationship. That’s still going to happen.

I still had hope. And I didn’t want him to give me any.