Sunshine

I grew up in a sleepy little town in Arizona, it's halfway between Phoenix and Flagstaff. Over the years, the town has grown and expanded, but it's still the same sleepy little place. The busiest place on a Saturday night is still the bowling alley, and after you hit it up it's always fun to head to Tony's Place for karaoke night, where you meet all kinds of people. The friends you had in high school, the ones that stay in town, end up being your life long friends. There's a courthouse, but no jail, a community college, but no university, two movie theaters, though one has been closed down for years and only recently reopened. There's still a Kmart and most people prefer Fry's to Walmart. The town's biggest event is the Rodeo around Independence day. We didn't really get a fair, but the hockey stadium/concert hall/graduation event place usually holds a couple of carnivals. The courthouse does Art Walks and festivals, and the sure sign of a small town? The High School Rivalry. There are two high schools in the sleepy little town I grew up in, which is really like one town with about eight miles of land in the middle. So there's these two high schools, Prescott and Bradshaw Mountain, which everyone just refers to as Bradshaw. Being a student at Bradshaw, I hated Prescott. See, there's a huge football rivalry between the two, and every high school student picks a side. It doesn't matter if you hate football or sports or even school, chances are at the Prescott-Bradshaw game, you'll be there. It's the biggest game of the year, bigger than homecoming. So yes, I grew up in a sleepy little town in Arizona.

Nothing much every happens there. You don't really hear murder stories or too many car accidents, the weather is always predictable. It rains on the Fourth of July and snows on St. Patrick's day, Christmas is never white, the wind is always whipping, and the sunset consistently looks like it's a painting, instead of real life. In my sleepy hometown, most places are closed by eight and school lets out at two. Oh, here's a fun fact; every year on 420 the high school tells students that there's been a bomb threat and evacuates the school to the football field and the bring in dogs, but it's not really a bomb threat, it's a drug search. But, really, nothing much every happens there.

Especially not to me.

Or at least that's how it felt. I was a bit of an outcast in high school. I was odd, and loud, and bookish. I'm pretty sure most people were embarrassed to be seen in the same room as me. But there was one boy... One boy who changed my perspective of myself entirely. And he nearly ruined me in the process.

To this day, if you look at some of my older works, you can see his influence, his touch almost. And in a lot of ways, it bothers me to this day.

Now, it's been almost six years, I'm going to be 21 this summer, I'm married (mind you, not to him,) and I have a beautiful three year old boy. But there are some days, I remember that summer so clearly. Like it's a diamond, unbreakable in my memories. So, here's the actual story.

My freshman year of high school was... up and down. My mom had insisted that, instead of going to the school all of my friends were going to, I had to go to the rival school. And it was hell. I didn't make a single friend, and I was there for almost an entire semester. On top of not making any friends, my academics suffered. Sure, my math scores were better than ever because my math teacher was awesome, and my English teacher was educated at Oxford, and my Biology teacher (though to this day I don't understand Biology) was pretty cool, but I just couldn't apply myself. I was uncomfortable and awkward and I always sat by myself. Even the library couldn't offer the safe haven I needed. The only thing I ever liked about that school was my Photography class, that was extremely cool.

Now, considering what the basis of this narrative really is, I feel no need to rehash the relationship I was in at the beginning of my freshman year. All I'll say on the subject is I am long since over the debacle that it turned into and to this day he remains a very dear friend of mine. But the second relationship of my freshman year, now there's our story.

So two thirds of the way through my failed semester at the enemy school my mother finally decided to transfer me to Bradshaw. Finally I had friends and I was in an environment where I was comfortable and I could be myself and I could love the library. Until they told me they didn't offer a photography class, but I couldn't exactly take an elective that wasn't similar, so I had to take Audio/Video production. And I got paired with him.

How was I supposed to know what would happen? How was I supposed to prepare for what was coming?

Slowly, I fell in love with him. And God was that painful. When it started though, it was purely joy. Someone had noticed me. A freshman who never really felt that pretty, who had braces and glasses and acne and dyed hair that had grown in five inches. I was loud and not as funny as I thought I was. I was annoying and maybe even a little crazy. But he noticed me. Except for one little detail.

He was four years older than me.

And a Senior.

Honestly, that should have been my first clue, come on, since when do seniors notice freshman other than to talk shit about them. Because trust me, when I was a Senior, that's what I did. However, instead of calling out the fact that he was far too old for me, I went with it. And I fell hard. I could be in the foulest mood ever and a simple text, no more than one word, could make the whole world right again. We spent that summer planning and plotting for a future together. we said that someday, we'd move to Canada, a province where they spoke French, we'd settle down and have twelve kids. (After having one, I now understand why that's utterly insane.) We would stay up all night, talking, exchanging quotes, being silly, looking at the same sky from across town. Once, in the middle of the night, he offered to have his aunt come pick me up to go camping with them. He used to call me his Rae of Sunshine, and that was interesting; a nickname no one had come up with before, a sign of his attention to me. He was the first person to really interest me in what sex could be. (Of course, that didn't happen, I waited, and I'm glad I did.) That summer stretched only two months, but it felt so much quicker.

And it felt like a whirlwind.

I've heard about whirlwind love stories, where everything is fast and crazy and it almost becomes too much. But the more I look back on it, the less I think it was a whirlwind and the more I try to pick out the lies. There are the obvious ones; “I'll love you forever.” “I'd do anything for you.” “You're my one and only”, and now in hindsight: “I love you.”. Although, over the years that followed, I thought that quite possibly there were more. Maybe what his interests were, maybe what his home life was like, maybe all the stories he told me, all of it, any of it. All I can think about the whole situation is, how much of it is a lie?

Sure, there are still some instances that I can recall where it seemed like maybe it wasn't all a lie. It was my idea to not tell my parents, which in retrospect was a horrendous idea. And there were a few times when he took me out and we had fun. Of course, he had no car so it was my mother would pick him up and drop us off under the guise that we were just really good friends. But we did go out, and we had a lot of fun, and I loved him.

Eventually though, my mother found out. To this day I don't know how, but she did. And she separated us. And for while, we worked around it. We dated other people but still spent time together. My mother, somehow, caught on. And of course, that really ended it. She got a restraining order, and he was removed from the school, because he didn't graduate like a normal senior, he had to come back and repeat his senior year.

I think that for me, what really ended it, was being in the court room and having him deny that anything ever happened.

I was crushed. I spent days crying. I spent months recovering. The next person I dated (who turned out to be another psycho, by the way) wanted to go far faster emotionally than I could. He constantly wanted to profess that he loved me, and I couldn't believe it. He would tell me he wanted a future together and I would admonish him, feeling that he would change his mind like the one before him. Eventually he turned out to be an asshole, so it only lasted a few months.

Finally, I was found by my husband, and though it's been rocky, we've pulled through. He and I have been through all kinds of craziness, but we figured it out. when he said he was going to stick around, he meant it; and he did. He changed everything for me. He showed me the sunshine again, showed me the color in the world, helped me to make a beautiful baby boy, got me out of that hick town that we grew up in, and has held my hand through every rough patch. And before you ask, yes, he is older than me.

But only by two years this time.

Yet, the greatest thing my husband has ever done for me, was to open my eyes to what a good, healthy relationship is. And when he did that, I packed every memento from the creep that crushed me into a plastic bag, and I threw it at him, and I never looked back.

Sometimes, I look back, and I think about how it could have been, or what might have been, and I realize that it never would have been right.

I recently read an article by a famous author who went through almost the same thing and it made me think of something. In those days, I would have said that age is just a number and that it doesn't entirely matter, you can fall in love with anyone. But reading that article, and knowing that what happened to me can, and might, happen to anyone I've realized something. Age, though it may just be a number, grows for a reason. Older people, whether it's a man or a woman, should know better when you're only a teenager. You shouldn't be older and preying on a younger person who won't know any better because they're just happy to be receiving your attention. It's wrong.

They say that hindsight is always seen in perfect vision. Well, in hindsight, I wish I could sit down with myself that summer and say, "You think he's what makes the sun shine, but darling, he's not. He's what makes your eyes tear and your cuts bleed. He's the thoughts in your head that rip you apart, and my God, I know you love him but he's killing you."

Because coming from myself, I just might have believed it.