Buoy

It was orientation at an all-womens college I attended for a few years, and there were girls everywhere. We were all looking for groups to co-mingle with for the upcoming orientation white water rafting trip, and I noticed her right away. Her name is Ryan, and she is lovely. We only said hello to each other, but the pleasant timbre of her voice still rings in my ears. Her poised exuberance stayed in her eyes; she shyly waved back, her shoulders rising a bit toward her ears. She has a moon-shaped face, her hair just past her ears, and the most soulful eyes. It took all I had to not stare at her. I think I failed in that respect.

One thing that made this interaction different from others was that normally I do all I can to not look directly at people’s eyes. I have always been intimidated by eye contact; though usually they meant well, each time someone looked at me I thought they were judging me, looking for something I did wrong. I think this notion stems from the years I spent in the special education system – more often than not the teachers would force me to look at them in the eye, so that I’d pay attention to them. After lots of practice – including one three-hour session where my mom, parked by the fridge, told my sister and me to repeatedly look at her in the eye – I found a way to cheat. I looked at people’s foreheads or in between the eyes instead of directly at them. And no one really noticed.

Looking into Ryan’s eyes, if only for that moment, felt familiar. I wasn’t going to drown in judgment-infested waters. I could rest on a buoy, rest for a bit.

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One time I made a list of all the crushes I had on the girls I knew at college. I can’t find it right now, but this is my endeavor at an approximation.

Ryan – my first, lasting crush. I still get butterflies when I think of her. Her poetry and writing abilities trounce mine in every possible way. In a creative nonfiction class, she read her chapter aloud and her voice rung through and through. She spoke of experience plumbed from the deepest sorrows with a lilting tone. Once she finished, I physically dropped my paper onto the table the class shared, physicalizing my thought of “I give up”. She has a boyfriend now, but that’s okay. I want her to be happy.

Charlie – Her name is actually Megan, but everyone calls her Charlie. She’s lived through a lot. In passing I remember her telling someone, a closer friend, that an ex used to beat the shit out of her, and that then she’d beat the shit out of him. Her voice cracked with a riotous alto tone, saying statements instead of questions in class. Her curly brownish-blonde hair made her look like an adult version of Shirley Temple. She regularly smoked weed (but was never caught for possession), drank way too much at the apartment parties (often drinking everyone around her under the table), and wrote a one-woman show called “please scream inside your heart”. She’s not on social media, so I have no idea what’s going on with her right now. We didn’t hang out much together, but I admired from afar, as you do.

[is that all?]

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You make me jealous

You make me envious

I feel this way because

You don’t have to live with your controlling grandma; you get to be independent.

- That time will come to an end eventually

You have pets – really cute ones

- We aren’t allowed to have pets, you know that

You carry on so easily with people on Twitter (and I bet irl too), especially that same person we both like and admire. They’re so cool and awesome and strong and magnanimous and kind and wonderful and talented and funny and silly – there’s so much to admire and like within this one person. And you carry on so easily!!! You don’t have to struggle to make the words coming out of your fingertips make sense. You don’t have to deal with flopped tweets that barely get a like. You don’t have to deal with the sense of crushing disappointment in yourself, that you didn’t get a like, and that you didn’t get a response to a meme or a “clever” tweet you crafted over the course of 300 seconds or less – you’re already so popular and I hate it. I hate that I don’t carry on easily with other people, with them – I hate it. Will it give my life meaning if I did? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe! Maybe!! MAYBE. MAYBE. I want attention too. I want it. I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it

- I…I’ve got nothing. Sit with this feeling for a while. Dwell in it. Get to the root of it. Maybe someday it’ll stop feeling like a noose, not at your beck and call.

I want to be adored. Why do I feel this way?

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Something told me this was not going to be easy.

I managed to smuggle some cardstock paper from the art department closet, and I then used one of the working spaces there to get constructing. Using a template of a heart, I sketched another onto the card stock, folded it in half, and used scissors to cut the heart shape out of its paper frame, releasing it into the wild. Once done with that step, the rest was much of the usual Valentine’s construction shtick that one finds in an elementary school classroom. (My art skills don’t exist beyond that time, sorry folks.) Pen light in my hand, I drew a heart within the heart, and then another, and then two more.

It was easier than I expected. The hard part, however, was in the script. What would I say to them, to her? Could it be so easy, and yet so difficult, to write my feelings down from brain to paper? I’ve done it before, but this time feels different, somehow. This may be a crush, but there are stakes involved. They…they already have someone. Am I a fool to write this at all? Yes. Yes am I. Even so. I’ve already made it for them. The canvas is here – might as well use it.

I write.

I tell them, tell her, how I feel.

Almost immediately I fold the paper, bringing the words out of my sight.

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