Speak Slow, Tell Me More
Have you ever?
The next day, for some reason, everything seemed so much more important. My hair needed to be straighter, my eyeliner needed to be darker. My uniform needed to be cooler, more individual. Everything just mattered so much more.
This wasn't anything new for me. If I want something/someone, I work my arse off and I get it/him/her. It's something I used to do a lot. I was addicted to those first-crush feelings. That first time kiss that makes your whole world spin. I'd just get bored and quit right after I'd finished making them fall in so-called "love" with me. Ok, it was bitchy, immature, and just intense lust, but it was fun. I wanted to prove to myself I was better than all those wasters who were looking for perfection, candy hearts, someone to hold hands with on valentines day.
But Mark was something new. I didn't think I was better than him. I didn't think he'd be easy to "get". And I didn't want to get him the same way I wanted to "get" the others.
After school, we ambled into town. I lived in pretty much the coolest town on earth. It was one of the few things that even then, I would honestly love.
Well a town can't lie to you, can it? It can't cheat on you, it can't betray you and break your heart. It can't love you or not love you back. It can just sit there with the smallest pub in England and the huge abbey ruins that you can run through screaming with friends or sit alone in and think for hours. It's a good thing to love.
He was new around the area, so I gave him the tour. The spot my friends and I always meet, every saturday at 11. The charity shop where we'd meet at 12 when I had to work there. I'd quit a while ago. The shop where you can go talk to Kat who works behind the counter after school for hours when you're bored. The spots with cool graffiti. The bench where we stood and preached satanism to piss of the wandering evangelist. I did fall in love with something else in the hour I was showing him around. I loved the idea of what was happening. I was showing him more than just a town, I was showing him my entire world. And he understood that. He understood that entirely.
We were supposed to meet some friends but somehow we missed that. We just kept walking, talking. Filling blank spaces with disconnected words and thoughts and ideas.
It was one of those barely serious conversations where we would flirt and joke and tease in that annoyingly pretentious way where it just gets in the way until you get to the inevitable. But there was something else, something more. There was this serious undertone where we knew what we were doing, and kept prolonging it as long as possible because the moment we finally reached that stupid inevitable, everything would be cheapened, over, ruined. That feeling of "all that work, the straightening, the make up. All for that?". It was frustrating because I knew where it could have lead and I didn't want it to. I didn't want anything to be cheapened. I wanted to be able to feel love and everything to be simple so that we could have that movie kiss in the rain and walk into the sunset. But I'd been there before. And after you walk into the sunset it gets cold, and dark, and then you need them the most to protect you and they elect to dissapear and you have to make it on your own just as you thought you wouldn't ever have to again. Everyone always forgets that in the real world the story has to keep going after the credits roll.
That's why I'd chosen the life I had. I wouldn't let the story change, I wouldn't take in any plot twists or ideas of happy endings. Because one day there will always be an unhappy ending. And I wasn't taking that risk again.
Eventually our random wanderings took us to the point where our paths would have to part. I reached my arms up around his neck to give him a hug goodbye, and took a chance glance into his eyes. I knew what would happen if I didn't move to far away, and I think he read my mind as a hand reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and he started to duck his head down toward mind. I began to switch onto autopilot as I closed my eyes and moved my head up.
But a thought occured to me. Could I really just do this? Just go onto autopilot and add another notch onto my bedpost?
"Don't."
This wasn't anything new for me. If I want something/someone, I work my arse off and I get it/him/her. It's something I used to do a lot. I was addicted to those first-crush feelings. That first time kiss that makes your whole world spin. I'd just get bored and quit right after I'd finished making them fall in so-called "love" with me. Ok, it was bitchy, immature, and just intense lust, but it was fun. I wanted to prove to myself I was better than all those wasters who were looking for perfection, candy hearts, someone to hold hands with on valentines day.
But Mark was something new. I didn't think I was better than him. I didn't think he'd be easy to "get". And I didn't want to get him the same way I wanted to "get" the others.
After school, we ambled into town. I lived in pretty much the coolest town on earth. It was one of the few things that even then, I would honestly love.
Well a town can't lie to you, can it? It can't cheat on you, it can't betray you and break your heart. It can't love you or not love you back. It can just sit there with the smallest pub in England and the huge abbey ruins that you can run through screaming with friends or sit alone in and think for hours. It's a good thing to love.
He was new around the area, so I gave him the tour. The spot my friends and I always meet, every saturday at 11. The charity shop where we'd meet at 12 when I had to work there. I'd quit a while ago. The shop where you can go talk to Kat who works behind the counter after school for hours when you're bored. The spots with cool graffiti. The bench where we stood and preached satanism to piss of the wandering evangelist. I did fall in love with something else in the hour I was showing him around. I loved the idea of what was happening. I was showing him more than just a town, I was showing him my entire world. And he understood that. He understood that entirely.
We were supposed to meet some friends but somehow we missed that. We just kept walking, talking. Filling blank spaces with disconnected words and thoughts and ideas.
It was one of those barely serious conversations where we would flirt and joke and tease in that annoyingly pretentious way where it just gets in the way until you get to the inevitable. But there was something else, something more. There was this serious undertone where we knew what we were doing, and kept prolonging it as long as possible because the moment we finally reached that stupid inevitable, everything would be cheapened, over, ruined. That feeling of "all that work, the straightening, the make up. All for that?". It was frustrating because I knew where it could have lead and I didn't want it to. I didn't want anything to be cheapened. I wanted to be able to feel love and everything to be simple so that we could have that movie kiss in the rain and walk into the sunset. But I'd been there before. And after you walk into the sunset it gets cold, and dark, and then you need them the most to protect you and they elect to dissapear and you have to make it on your own just as you thought you wouldn't ever have to again. Everyone always forgets that in the real world the story has to keep going after the credits roll.
That's why I'd chosen the life I had. I wouldn't let the story change, I wouldn't take in any plot twists or ideas of happy endings. Because one day there will always be an unhappy ending. And I wasn't taking that risk again.
Eventually our random wanderings took us to the point where our paths would have to part. I reached my arms up around his neck to give him a hug goodbye, and took a chance glance into his eyes. I knew what would happen if I didn't move to far away, and I think he read my mind as a hand reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and he started to duck his head down toward mind. I began to switch onto autopilot as I closed my eyes and moved my head up.
But a thought occured to me. Could I really just do this? Just go onto autopilot and add another notch onto my bedpost?
"Don't."