Would folks be interested in reading more of my (old) creative writing like Unwisely?
I’m not 100% sure I’m going to post it (it’s long; plus, I’m a little anxious about putting up my creative work in easily “copy-pastable” form) either way. But I figured I should at least find out if there’s interest before making a decision.
Another portion — maybe the final portion? — of the story from here. Trigger warnings for abuse and self-harm.
The reflection in my bedroom mirror. Summer blond hair along my temple. Under it, a purple bruise blossoming.
Serious and not serious. If it had been anyplace other than my head, no one would have thought twice about it. For my life-is-a-contact-sport self, accidental and incidental body bruises were a frequent occurrence. But heads? Noteworthy. I would at least be expected to remember how I’d gotten it.
I did, of course, remember. That was just the problem.
My hand trembled, holding my knife, opened. I held the blade to the opposite temple. What drove me to cut at all drove me to cut my face now. It required that cut to offset the other mark.
I didn’t know why. Equity, maybe, or balance. Justice.
I resisted.
Vanity. Not wanting another colorful wound on my face.
Anxiety. Worrying my hand would slip, or I would cut too deep. Head wounds can bleed a lot.
Terror. The answers I didn’t have. The questions people would ask.
I couldn’t do it.
I tried the inside of my thigh, flesh that was soft and safe and yielding. I tried the point of my hip, skin that was thin and stretched over bone. I tried the side of my shoulder, muscle that was strong but exposed. Nothing satisfied that need; it had to be the face.
I still couldn’t do it.
The tears came then, flooding, hot, sniveling, desperate. For the first time, I didn’t even try to hold them back. I closed the knife and set it on my dresser, then curled into a ball and sobbed onto my knees.
“This isn’t me,” I repeated, whispering to myself. “This isn’t me.”
I cried myself to sleep on my bedroom floor.
_______________________________________________
I trembled as I walked up to him, shook. Couldn’t feel my arms at my sides or my legs under me.
I had arrived late to the final exam, so I could be sure he’d already be testing — and couldn’t talk to me — by the time I walked into class. He waited for me after.
“I can’t see you anymore,” I told him straight out, my quaking voice barely above a whisper.
He turned away.
Silence.
Disbelief.
Dread.
Silence.
“What?” His voice was quiet too, but dangerous. I tried hard to read his body because he still didn’t face me.
“I can’t see you anymore,” I repeated, louder, with a confidence I didn’t feel.
He turned back to me, his face arranged to be contrite. “Look, I’m sorry. If it’s because of–”
“It’s not because of anything,” I lied. And interrupted, watching how his jaw tensed when I did. “It’s just something that’s going to happen.”
He swallowed. Working, I thought, to keep his composure. Palms up, he held out his hands. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.” This time, I turned away from him.
Among the last few continuations of this story. (I’m predicting maybe 13 or 14 parts in total.) Trigger warnings for relationship abuse and self-harm.
It worked — as much as you can call it that — for a while. I had control again, even if he couldn’t see it at first. That control comforted me, even at the cost of tearing my skin and watching blood seep out of me. Which probably doesn’t say good things about my mental health, but it did seem to work.
I want to say I stopped caring about what he did to me, though that isn’t quite true. I still cared, but not in the same way. The comments and the hitting shamed and humiliated me, but I didn’t spend nearly so much of my brain planning them out anymore. I stopped provoking, stopped inciting. I stopped playing by his rules; he stopped being in control.
Of course, this only infuriated him more. What he wanted, what he craved, was that control. Yes, he wanted to see my shame and tears afterward, but he also wanted to see my terror beforehand. When he couldn’t have that anymore, it not only deprived him of power pleasure, but I think it actually made him scared.
“Class is going to be over soon,” I commented dully one evening during our break.
“You think so?” he asked, falsely casual. “We haven’t even discussed half the readings yet. You don’t think it will go the full time?”
“I meant, the final exam is next week.”
He started to massage my shoulders, a gesture that looked caring but that I’d learned could be made painful with relative subtlety. Worst case scenario, if I cried out, he could pretend it was accidental due to unknown muscle tightness. “Good call. Are you saying you want to make a study date? We haven’t had one of those in a while.”
I shrugged my shoulders into his hands. “We can do that if you want.”
“Are you saying that isn’t what you want?” He dug in nails.
It didn’t hurt much, so I didn’t move. “I just wanted to make sure you wanted to spend our last week of class together studying for an exam.”
He bit my neck. It hurt, would bruise, but my hair would hide it. “What do you mean our last week together?”
“Of class, I said.”
Mouth still close to my ear, he whispered, “That’s not all you said. You said last week together. Do you not like me anymore?”
Well, no, I didn’t, not like this. “Class is starting again.” Everyone else had trailed in though the professor hadn’t yet closed the door.
His hand at the back of my skull slammed my head into the corner of the brick wall. My vision whirled and sparkled for a few seconds. Instinctively, I brought one hand to my head and pressed the other into the wall as I stood up.
“I’ll see you Friday at eight if that works for you. In the library.” I stepped into the women’s bathroom and didn’t let the first tear come until the door swung shut behind me.
No one entered for several minutes, well after I’d locked myself inside a stall.
“Are you okay?” I recognized the voice of one of my classmates. “You’ve been gone from class a while.”
I willed my voice calm; I managed exasperated. “Yeah. Genius me just managed to bleed through my pants again.” Which wasn’t true this time but had been before. More importantly, it was an awkward enough explanation as to escape further questioning.
“Do you need anything?”
May as well commit to the lie, I thought. “An extra pad if you have one.”
“I only have tampons,” she said apologetically. “Will those work?”
I brought my fingers down from my head; they were rusty brown with dried blood. “Thanks, but no. I think I’m just going to go home early tonight.” I pulled off my jacket, the one I wore because school’s classrooms were about fifty degrees by evening, and tied it around my waist.
“The last class before the exam? Are you sure?”
I raked my hair forward, hoping it covered whatever mark or mess was visible on my head. “If I have questions, I’ll find the prof during his office hours.” I came out of the stall and rinsed my hands, careful not to look in the mirror or at her. I don’t know what she saw.
“I’ll be fine, really.” I left.
Another story continuation. Trigger warnings for relationship abuse and self-harm.
I was undressing.
I had taken my shirt off and was staring at the bruise on my left shoulder. It was blue at the center, fading to green and then yellow around the edges.
I stared at it. It would have been almost pretty if the reason for it wasn’t so ugly. The very center of it was still pink from where it had hit the corner of the bookshelf. From where he had pushed me into the corner of the bookshelf.
I stared at it.
On my dresser, my pocketknife — the one I kept for cutting bailing twine — lay closed. I stared at it, walked over to it, opened it.
I gazed at the steel blade, knowing it was sharp.
I should have been nervous, scared. Should have recognized that to entertain this idea was a sign of mental instability and unhealth, that something was prying away my finger-hold on reality. In actual reality, however, I was completely calm as I took the knife and cut a small testing gash — maybe two or three inches — along the inside of my forearm. It wasn’t deep, as my pressure hadn’t been great, and beads of blood slowly rose to the surface. I held my arm up, watched and waited as the blood ran down in straight lines, at near right angles to the cut itself.
The pattern and contrast of the red lines against the near white of my skin was mesmerizing. Like the bruise, it was like the colors of my injuries were separate features from the injuries themselves — from my body itself.
I don’t know if it was the sight of the blood, the pain from the cut, both together, or something else entirely, but it made me feel in control. Not pretend control like when I provoked a hit that I could see coming just so I could continue to see them coming — but like, in the big picture, I was actually in control of what happened to me. Deluded or not, I figured that I was going to hurt one way or another, but here, I controlled the pain: where it happened, when it came, how much it hurt. And while pleasure would hardly be the word to describe it, I did get a kind of grim satisfaction, knowing he couldn’t hurt me worse than I could hurt myself.
Sorry I’ve been slacking on the story continuation. I’ve been stressed and sick and have had neither the physical nor the emotional energy necessary to go back to this.
Trigger warnings for relationship abuse and self-harm.
After that, something broke, not that it had worked well to begin with. But I stopped pretending, even to him, that he wouldn’t do it again. He stopped pretending to be sorry.
I suppose I could have handled it better, in that world where people aren’t people but are perfect instead. Technically, I could have done a lot of things other than what I did, which was to watch our conversations for the moment where I could provoke him. I had resigned myself to the fact that it was going to happen, that I was going to feel humiliated because I kept letting it happen, because I stayed. The least I could do was take control of when and why it happened.
“Your bra strap is showing. It makes you look trashy.”
“Don’t call me trashy. It makes you sound like an asshole.”
He’d pinch at the ribs under my arms, right where the bra band would be. To remind me.
“Are you coming out in those shorts?”
“You afraid the bruises will show?”
And there would be more bruises, this time on the insides of my thighs.
The hitting hurt, yes, and the pinching and the shoving. But it hurt my pride more than anything else, that someone used my body this way, that I let him use me this way.
But I stayed because I refused to be the one to back down.
Yet another story continuation. Trigger warnings for relationship abuse and self harm.
I want to say we didn’t ignore it. And technically, we didn’t.
The first time we talked in person again, after that class, I said, “One good reason.”
He said, “There aren’t any.”
“Damn straight,” I replied.
But after that, in terms of ignoring it, we really did.
I want to say that we didn’t avoid talking about it. We didn’t pretend it never happened. We just didn’t dwell on it. But I know now that would be lying to myself.
I thought we could get past it. He was horrified when he did it, I thought — that he could keep himself in check for a while, that I could learn to see it coming. He didn’t; I did. Briefly, of course, we returned to a passing for normal, a place where we were both trying to hear and make ourselves heard.
We met for studying a lot because it was purposeful, platonic, safe. We had something neutral to talk about again where, even if we disagreed, we at least knew those disagreements were academic rather than personal. It’s a little safer to argue over whether Willy Loman is the most sympathetic character in Death of a Salesman because at some point, we felt silly arguing over imaginary people anyway.
Except talking about Death of a Salesman lends itself to talking about the concept of the American Dream, which leads to us dangerously discussing our own futures.
We were in a park, our first meeting without the pretense of schoolwork, though not the first meeting where we’d abandoned the pretense. My head rested on his chest, our bodies at right angles on the grass. For a long time, we just lay there in the sun and breeze, enjoying that the day was too dry for mosquitoes and too cool for flies. Cool snaps in summer are not unappreciated.
“It’s nice to be able to get out and actually be in a day that looks beautiful, you know?” he asked. “Like in summer sometimes it looks beautiful, especially, like, at the beach. Only it’s way too hot to actually enjoy spending much time there.”
“Or in the winter,” I agreed, “when you see the sun sparkling on some clean snow, and it looks like it would be a fabulous idea to go for a walk or have a snowball fight. Then you get there and remember that snow is both cold and wet. Even if you go back inside right away — which, sometimes, you have to be out shoveling snow or whatever — it takes forever to get warm and dry again, especially if your socks get stuck inside your boots while you’re taking them off.”
“I like the cold,” he protested, laughing. “You can always put on more clothes to get over being cold, but you can’t get less dressed than naked. And a lot of places even frown on going that far.”
I turned over to face him, propping myself on my elbows. “Though there’s sometimes a limit to the amount of clothes you have with you. And when it’s happening, I hate being cold way more than being hot.”
“I’d like to move north of here someday, I think.”
“Greenland, here you come!” I joked.
He rolled his eyes. “A little extreme, but somewhere that doesn’t get hot-hot and that’s farther away from big cities. Buy a bunch of land, plop a house in the middle of it, not have to deal with so many damn people all the time.”
“Far away from everyone in the cold?” I smiled. “That sounds like lots of snow to shovel, icy socks, and not my idea of a good time.”
He closed his eyes. “You’d get used it it.”
“Who says I’d be there?” I bristled and drew back a little.
He opened one eye. “Let’s not start this again.”
“Start what?” I felt myself slipping. I may have sighed. “I’m just not into it when people make assumptions about what I will or won’t like or where I’m going to be one day.”
“Which is fine, but maybe you could tell me without being a bitch about it.”
For me, there has always been something about name calling. “You know what? I’m pretty sure I have to be anywhere else right now.” I stood up. “We can talk about this later.”
He grabbed my wrist and pulled me back down. My arm grated inside my shoulder socket. “We can talk about this now.”
“That hurt,” I said.
He blinked, confused.
“We can talk about this later.”
Continued. Trigger warnings for relationship violence and self harm.
I blinked back the tears, refusing to let them fall. I didn’t run because I was leaving forever or even because I was scared of him. I ran because I was afraid of myself; I felt like I’d driven him to it.
I mean, I knew my statement would have been uncomfortable under the best of circumstances. And my phrasing — and in the context of talking about my dad — was far from the best of circumstances. If someone had insinuated that I was dating predatorially, I’d be pissed too.
But sufficiently pissed to use my physical force against them?
At the time, I thought it was reasonable. Or at least forgivable.
Or at least that I was the one out of line for feeling so bad.
From here. Continued warning for relationship violence and self-harm. Also, for people who have been reading both the posts and the trigger warning notes the whole time, this is, I think, where things become more explicit.
The first time, it’s hard to see the argument starting. Which is not to say that the first time meant our first argument. Practically every other conversation we had either started out as or turned into an argument. We were okay with that; hell, we enjoyed it.
“Would you rather just turn it in with that conclusion or would you like to work out in again?” I asked just before midterms.
“If I left my paper as is,” he followed, “would that give you more time to get yours done?”
“It might,” I shrugged. “Why?”
“Because then I might get to spend more time with you… you know… socially.”
On some topics, there was room for agreement.
Even where we didn’t agree, couldn’t, it’s far, I think, to point out that we didn’t argue for the sake of arguing. We didn’t bait one another, and we didn’t play devil’s advocate.
“I would like that,” he continued, “and, if we’re being totally honest–”
“There was a time when we weren’t?” I looked at him quizzically.
“This is a new thing,” he clarified, “but it would be nice to meet somewhere other than on or near campus.”
Which was kind of a tricky situation, considering that I was bending the truth enough to my parents. To be somewhere other than where I said I was would be a deception more concrete than I could manage on short notice. “I could maybe manage something for next week.”
“Or you could just tell them.”
“No.”
He sighed, sad and slow, looping an arm around my shoulders. “It’s hard. I’m not okay being a secret.”
“I don’t know what to do.” I placed one of my hands over his. “I know my parents. Realistically, the choices are present secret or past. Past us.”
He pressed his lips to my temple. “You don’t think they’d come around eventually? I’m a nice guy.”
I turned to face him inside his embrace. “Nice wouldn’t have anything to do with it, given what the numbers look like.”
“And what do the numbers look like?”
I should have heard it, the catch in his voice. I should have felt it, the brief tensing of his fingertips. I should have recognized the anger.
But I didn’t.
“Like an adult who’s interested in dating a minor.”
“So you think I’m a pervert now?” He stepped back, grabbing, taking my upper arms with him.
“I didn’t say that.” I took a step back.
He helped, shoving my shoulders with the heels of his hands.
I could describe how hard the push was or wasn’t, how far back I stumbled or not, whether it hurt or it didn’t. It doesn’t matter; it was enough.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
I turned and fled.
Another continuation. Trigger warning for relationship violence and self harm.
We didn’t get to see each other a whole lot oat first, so we wrote notes and letters and poems. We talked on the phone too sometimes, but that was more to hear the other person’s voice than for having anything substantial to say. Mostly we wrote. It was almost like having a pen pal than a boyfriend.
Boyfriend. That word was new to me, at least as a legitimate label for anyone in my life. I’d had crushes before — boys and girls — and even boys I liked who liked me back. (I don’t know about girls liking me back: I grew up in a place where it wasn’t okay to have the feelings I did, so I didn’t talk about them.) But it was one thing to say, “I have these feelings, but I’m scared and socially awkward and don’t really know how to proceed,” and quite another to say, “All of the above is true, but fuck it, I’m going in anyway.”
In retrospect, it was not my most brilliant life move.
But I think it was because we wrote that we got so close — or thought we got so close — so quickly. In my letters, there was time to form the thoughts and words that always slip by me in spoken dialogue, when the conversation moves on and I have to move on with it. That said, there was also the finality of sending a letter in the mail, sending those words out into the world, not being able to take back what’s written on the page. I couldn’t laugh something off, turn a serious statement into a joke, or pretend I didn’t mean it.
So what are we now, you and me?
Classmates and acquaintances? I will be disappointed if that is all there is to us.
I won’t be disappointed if the answer is “friends,” but I think that is not quite right either. Not complete.
Are we different, or am I imagining?
It was hard to put up false fronts, sheen the veneer of sarcasm, duck behind a mask. It’s harder to commit to an untruth on paper, maybe especially for people who consider themselves writers, at least for both of us.
So we didn’t play games.
You are not imagining.
Continuing this story. Also continuing the trigger warnings for relationship abuse and self-harm.
“Where are you off to?” my mom asked as I grabbed my keys off the kitchen table.
“The library on campus?” I pointed to my backpack. “I have a study group.”
“On Saturday?” She didn’t sound accusing, just surprised. “You don’t mean to tell me that you’re all working on schoolwork on a Saturday, do you?”
I shrugged. “It was the only day everyone could meet. Plus, it’s air conditioned inside.”
“Well, then, you’d better be back by dinner,” Mom replied, fishing a five dollar bill from her wallet. “And pick up some diet pop and milk on the way home.”
“Yes, Mom.” I kissed her on the cheek, then headed out the door.
“Sweetie?” she called.
“Yes?” I poked my head back in the door.
Mom was frowning. “This class isn’t too hard for you, is it? That you’re working on Saturday? You don’t have to take classes in the summer, you know.”
“Yes, Mom, I know,” I said, rolling my eyes just a little, “but I’m not going to the study group to get help. I’m going because I’m helping them.”
It was not, technically speaking, a lie. Some of it even had the advantage of being the whole truth. Neither one of us had much money or free time. So studying — not to mention writing essays and term papers — became dates, which made it that much easier to hide from my mom.
A study group was a possibility; we had invited them. Never mind that the three other people had all said “probably not” or “I don’t think I can make it.” It could still happen, technically.
Of course, Mom would believe what Mom wanted to believe. That she believed I was smart, savvy, competent young woman was no doubt modeled off her own experience and a seventeen-year-old. Plus, it had the advantage of being true, technically, though it was far from the whole truth.
I can say now that if she would have pressed further, I would have told her the whole truth. Eventually. Maybe. In reality, I might have been so infatuated — with him, with the possibility of an us, with the mere idea of me going out on my own — that I might have lied anyway.
Still, I wish she would have asked.
The third installment of this story. Trigger warnings for self-harm and relationship abuse.
He made me think, and he encouraged me to say what I was thinking. No one else did that, at least not on any topic more emotionally invested than how to solve a physics problem. I wouldn’t say that no one else cared what I thought, but no one else cared enough to talk my thoughts out of me.
“I have a favor to ask,” he said one evening when class ended early.
I raised an eyebrow. “Ask.” I hadn’t meant to sound commanding; I was just curious.
He took a step back. “Easy there, killer,” he replied, winking. “Didn’t mean to make you mad. I was just wondering if you might have time to help me with my paper.”
I glanced at the clock. “For about an hour. What’s yours about?”
He took another step, this time sheepish. “I, um, haven’t started yet.”
Now both eyebrows shot up. “It’s due Thursday.” That was two days away.
“I realize.” He smiled wryly. “And I’ll start just as soon as I can come up with a topic. Speaking of which, what’s yours about?”
“The Chocolate War and how it’s basically the first young adult novel,” my face started to flush, and I slid my eyes toward the ground.
“He’s letting you do that?” He slung his backpack over his shoulder and started walking toward the library. I followed.
“It’s a significant development in contemporary American literature,” I returned, meeting his gaze again. “It’s a legitimate paper topic.”
“But you don’t think, maybe John Updike’s ‘A&P’?” He held the door open for me to walk through first.
I stopped to stare at him. “‘A&P’ is a short story, so it pretty much couldn’t be the first young adult novel.”
“I stand corrected,” he smiled and ushered me inside.
I’ve never been a fan of the door thing. Even when a guy’s intentions have been more polite and less look-at-me chivalrous, I’ve still felt uncomfortably self-conscious. I like to think I don’t want people to pay that much attention to me. So I was ready, for an instant, to feel defensive and socially inept.
Except that it didn’t happen. There was no moment where I lurked awkwardly in the doorway, trying to reconcile social expectation with my own discomfort — before inevitably deferring to accepted polite behavior. There was just a moment when I made one point, he responded, and we both moved on.
Inside the library, it was nearly deserted but not quiet. There were more people talking on phones or to each other than were doing any kind of focused studying. We didn’t bother keeping our voices down.
“What about Catcher in the Rye?” he continued without missing a beat. “It’s a young adult novel, and it was written something like twenty years earlier.”
I shook my head. I’d already gone through this in my own head while writing. “Catcher is a book with a teen protagonist, yes, but I don’t think that’s the same as a book written for teens. The dif–”
“What’s the difference?”
“I was getting to that,” I explained. “In Catcher in the Rye, Holden’s telling his own story, looking back on his past from somewhere in the future, yes?”
“I suppose that’s true,” he replied, “given that he’s the one narrating. Yes.”
“Now it might be — and this is where I have to do more reading — that there are clues that Holden is only looking back on these events from, like, a week later. But when I read it for the first time — and maybe wasn’t paying the best attention to things — it felt like there was enough perspective, at least with what he chose to put in and leave out, that he was maybe telling his story from a lot later.”
He grinned. “You’re cute when you’re nerdy, you know that?”
“Then I must always be cute,” I smiled. “In The Chocolate War — “
“Super nerd,” he laughed. “Didn’t you notice I just called you cute?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “This is important. When a chapter is being narrated from Jerry or Archie or whoever’s point of view, it’s actually being told through their present teenage eyes. All we see is what they see; all we know is what they know.”
He nodded, the corners of his lips twitching up. “This is significant?”
I shrugged, staring out the window at the cone of light from a streetlamp. “It’s maybe the first time an author wrote a book that portrayed teens as full people themselves rather than as undeveloped adults. And the first time it showed that teenage problems could be real problems. But,” I turned to him, “what was this you were saying about me and cute?”
Continuing from here. Same trigger warnings for relationship abuse and self-harm apply.
There was a story.
“Would you walk away?” he asked one night after class.
The story was “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula LeGuin. It’s dystopic, about a city whose success depends on the forced suffering of a child. At some point while growing up, all of the citizens are told about the child, are required to see the child, and reassess thier understanding of the world from there. Despite learning that in this place, their happiness can only come from another’s suffering, most people choose to stay.
“Would you walk away?” he pressed, a little more insistently this time.
To be fair, I’d been silent a while, pondering. Because I recognized that I have had a pretty happy existence in this world and that I’d grown comfortable — complacent, even — in that happiness. My problems largely consisted of whether it was time to stop pining for the guy I’d been crushing on since ninth grade, dealing with the hassle of useless doctors, and wondering whether AP calculus was about to ruin my GPA in the coming year.
I wanted to say that even though the citizens of Omelas think they are happy, their happiness is not only superficial but self-deluding. Underneath it is the guilt their happiness is founded upon. Underneath is that child, one who is purposely made less so that others can be made more. What kind of happiness is that, I wanted to ask, to be dependent on the misery of someone else?
“I don’t think I could stay,” I said slowly.
Because really, what kind of authenticity is there to a life — to a joy — that is founded on lies?
“So you would walk away?” It was still a question, leaving space to clarify my response.
And yet I was comfortable in my complacent, maybe inauthentic joy. Happy, even, I could tell myself. I could make myself believe.
“Someday.” I stared at the moon, my voice barely audible. “I like to think I would, anyway.”
Pre-reading notes:
- This story contains descriptions of relationship violence as well as self-injury. It may be triggering.
- This is a piece I wrote at age eighteen about events that happened mostly in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. While I altered some personally identifying information and while I’m sure my perception was biased, it is an attempt to record the truth of those events as I understood them.
- Given that I’m reworking an old draft, there’s a chance I will go back and edit posts well after they’re published. If there’s interest, I’ll publish a round-up announcement once I’m reasonably sure the story is in its final-ish form.
- This is not the only domestic abuse story that affects my life. But it is the safest one to tell.
“And if I could,” my father wrote to me,
huge as a bear himself, when I was younger,
“I would dower you with experience, without experience.”
and I, in my turn, would pass that on to you.
But we make our own mistakes. We sleep
unwisely.– Neil Gaiman, Locks
I was seventeen.
I was seventeen, and he was twenty.
Really, I was almost seventeen; it was June, and I turned seventeen in August. And he was almost twenty; he would have turned twenty in September.
We were not quite three years apart. Not quite three years, but a lifetime.
He had the most captivating green eyes. I know everyone says that, and maybe that is because every stereotypical teenager thinks that, but in this case, it was true.
Not because they were sparkling or twinkling or flashing. Not because they were an intense green. They were, in fact, greenish gray and kind of boring, in terms of appearances. But captivating. Not because they seemed to know what I was thinking or seemed to see into my soul, but simply because they were thoughtful. Not knowing the answers, but asking the questions.
That was a rare enough phenomenon in my experience with boys to make me pay attention.
And he did ask the questions, the questions that told me there was a mind working and thoughts forming behind those green eyes of his. When we had class together, he noticed details about the word choice and arrangement in the poems of Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath, and he asked about them:
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.**
And he always listened to — and watched — how people answered.
He noticed that I rarely joined in class discussions and arguments. Rather, I would sit back and watch the words fly across the room, sometimes spitefully, sometimes floating. And hear the tones, the inflections, the omissions, and the silences. I don’t think I would have been able to form an opinion on any poem just then. It was all I could do to take it all in.
He noticed this.
“You didn’t say much in class,” he started remarking on a regular basis. “What did you think?”
I started talking, hesitantly at first.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Some of the words — battering and scraping — are pretty rough. It’s hard to read them and not think of them hurting.”
“That makes sense. So why aren’t you sure?”
I looked away, not sure if it was a genuine question or if I was being called on my hopeless ineptitude in the class. “They aren’t the only words in the poem,” I replied, flustered.
“So I noticed,” he grinned at me.
I rolled my eyes, relaxing. “What I meant is that some of the other images — like where the child is still clinging to his shirt — make me feel like whatever this person did or didn’t do, it is a person the speaker loves or very much wants to love.”
** Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz“
