Fifteen

The summer you leave is the summer I get torn apart by mosquitos. Itching is the neurological opposite of pain. I think about that while I scratch the fuck out of my legs. Sometimes they bleed so much I have to tape tissues to my calves. I don’t want to be a person that doesn’t have scars.  Maybe my blood is so sweet because it tastes like binge-eating, ink, and longing. 

        What can I say about you, how I feel about you, that you don’t already know? I can say “I love you, too,” a million times over but I could never quantify it accurately. That I feel like I’m in a timewarp, that you carry my soul across the perceivable dimensions into this realm where I’m just alight, on fire, and not really alive but not really dead and it’s both and neither and I feel you solid in my veins.

        Now you’re gone and the want is there and it grows more and more and more each moment, each joke I can’t just lean over and whisper to you.

        How can I say that normally, I feel trapped inside my own head, trapped inside my own body, stuck inside myself and my routines and my way of thinking. How can I specify that when I’m around you, when our fingers interlace, suddenly I’m thrown into the space between us.  I exist entirely where my skin meets yours: entirely in the molecules of space between my hand and your hand. How can I say that when we kiss, my soul hangs out between my mouth and your mouth and I don’t feel like you  complete me or anything I just feel like I’m more than just myself when I’m with you. Like I’m anything I want to be, like I’m anything you want for me. 

        How can I keep my dignity and still tell you that you’re always always always on my mind and even when I’m off having fun with other people, I’m still just waiting until I hear from you again?

     

   How can I say I’m a strong person when I’m so needy? How can I pretend like I’m an independent girl when the thing that makes me happiest is when you slip into my bed and put your hands and teeth and lips and tongue all over me. When you grab me and pull me into you. When your fingers are in my hair and your legs are between my legs for me to rub up against?

        This want for you is real, I feel it: it’s a solid thing traveling through my bloodstream through my brain and my heart out to my limbs.

        You bring something out in me, something intense and visceral and wonderful. I’m an animal, but I’ve also transcended into a higher spiritual state. Maybe humanity is just the mix between the two so maybe, actually, you just make me feel human.

I like myself better around you. Like really. I feel like I’m more myself when you’re there than when you’re not. Not like we’re one being or anything sentimentally pathetic like that, just like… just like, everything I love about you amplifies in me. I take your positives into my heart.

I grow toward you like a plant grows out, tall, toward the sun. You, everything wonderful about you, grows in me and is nurtured by your presence and I try to think of all the things plants and human children need to grow properly. I wonder if I should start to meditate or start drinking more often.

I see you in cigarette butts and I hear you in guitar solos and I feel you when the bass is turned up. I see you in blonde girls at the mall with JUICYYYY across their preteen asses. I smell you in the iron of my blood when I bleed and I think of how many months it’s been since I saw you because I had started my period the day you left and that’s how I first started to keep track.

“Why do you always treat me like I’m more important than you?” you had asked me once, after an argument we had kind of a long time ago. At the time, I remember fantasizing (or just picturing?) you getting super mad and pushing me into the wall and banging my head against the wall again and again like when we fuck sometimes. “That shit is bananas and it makes me fuckin nuts.”

“Why don’t you treat me like I’m important at all?” I countered. It wasn’t relevant to the way you treat me, but I liked the way the retort sounded. I could look back over our relationship and come up with examples of how that was true, even if I didn’t believe them.

“There’s no space for me to turn around and return any favors at any time if you just keep giving and giving and giving.”

“It’s not like I mean to give, it’s just I started studying behavioral psychology around when we started dating and I began to be very, very receptive of you.”

“I started studying Marxism,” you said, “At the time. The Communist Manifesto and Animal Farm, but then I remember I read Fight Club and Brave New World.”

“That’s a very different mindset to start a relationship in,” I concurred, beginning to ponder what you must have been thinking about during those early months of us being a couple. At the time, I was paying attention to the way you reacted and changed your behavior depending on the stimuli I provided. All the things we talked about in my head must have been so much different from all the things we talked about in your head.

“It’s like sometimes, you’re in a great mood and I’m a horrible mood and then you tell me you have a great song stuck in your head and suddenly I realize that you’re in a totally different perceptive world than I am,” you said next as a tangent or I guess it was relevant in a convoluted way. You continued, “Then, I just start concentrating on getting a brighter soundtrack, focus on seeing the world as beautiful as you must be seeing it right now.”

I didn’t say anything.

You said, “Riot, I love you.”

I said, “I love you, too.”

Now you’re gone, and I don’t feel your thoughts in my head as loud as I used to. I don’t always predict your reactions to things with the accuracy I was once able to. And I wait for you. I feel like I’m always waiting for you. Like I’m supposed to hear from you as often as I used to. Like we’re supposed to stay connected. I no longer believe in a soul, because our transcendent souls should be together in the 4^th dimension even if our bodies are so far, far, far apart in the 3^rd. I feel like they aren’t. I feel like my soul was looking for yours and got tired and passed out, comatose, of exhaustion somewhere deep in my abdomen. I feel like you took my throat with you on a cross-country flight and maybe you forgot it in the seat pocket of your airplane.

I wonder if you wait for me to call you the way I wait for you to call me. Part of me hopes you do and part of me hopes not.

“Come back,” I want to say to you. “I haven’t been me since you left. Who am I going to become if we’re not evolving side by side? And who will you become evolving and growing in a whole other world? What if when we meet again I’m not really Riot and you’re not really Avery?”

I wonder if you think about this kind of thing at all. I wonder it while I doodle angry stick figures in the margins of my notes while my teachers lecture about the difference between race and culture. I wonder it while I’m masturbating in the shower and I wonder if you think of me while you do it or if you’ve met other beautiful girls.

It’s okay if you have. It’s okay if you’ve done things with them. I know Long Distance Relationships are supposed to crumble apart. I know all I can ask of you is to remember me fondly and fuck me super hard when you’re back in my state. And all I can ask is that when you do, you still pant out, “I love you, Riot,” even if it’s a lie just so I can still say, “I love you, too.”

                I hope it never comes to the point where: I long for you, but I am every other girl.