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tryveryhard · 5 years

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Six years

One. Tangled up in those big “look-at-me” necklaces, hung in the same cheap wood paneled-closets where women hung such things decades and decades before we, ourselves, were on the verge. So we got to talking. And we hated it, I’m sure. My hair thin and pressed close to my head, braces squeezing my teeth — this was still an era of low-rise jeans and believing life could end in acne-prone boys named Luke and Jake back home in Michigan. A had purple, died hair and didn’t believe in abortion, nor feminism. S had a heart-shaped face and a dimple at the end of her spine and believed in both. We all agreed upon peanut butter and cheap sheets. We were complete strangers doomed to share a room for at least a year. We would have to see one another’s breasts, our curved moons hanging in the dark. We would have to tell one another everything. We would have to share secrets across the room, across that wavy dark carpet, and think: adulthood. We would fall in love with one another by Christmas break.

This all seemed terribly exciting, our semi-sheer shirts and dining-hall salads. I wrote none of this down. I watched a boy get carried out of our dorm hall — Washington Hall, 49 E. Green Drive — and into the ambulance that waited for him on the slick pavement. I watched this scene from the window of my dorm stairwell, all covered in cracked plaster, and thought about how it felt awfully like the slick tile of the bathroom walls in my elementary school. Exotic, cool. I cried several times that year in public, and would pace around the lobby in that yellow glow, all panicked, calling my parents while I sobbed on the floor of the single bathroom that locked. And it always felt so haunted back then, that place. I realize now that’s because the whole placed dripped with the choking sobs of other young people. I touched at least five strange penises that year. I fucked at least two that I can remember. And that year, I became both addicted and un-addicted to Camel Blues. I got my braces off and grew my hair past my ears. I went to Pittsburgh for the first time, teetered around in high heels, and realized I still had growing up to do. The girls I fell in love with, we’d forget one another soon. But I left letters for them the day we left that room. And I think of them each day, trapped in that small square, us crashing against the walls of our teeny-tiny brains. Two. This was the year I got a better down comforter for my twin-sized mattress and became inextricably involved with people in the military. My roommate that year, H, had an eating disorder and a boyfriend who didn’t want to fuck her when she was bloated. She also wanted to be a nurse in the Navy. She studied relentlessly. And somewhere between Pittsburgh and leaving that room, I had fallen impossibly in love with a boy who would leave for a military base that October. I did not realize then that every woman must go through this at least once, this plot. I loved him for his height and for his almost endearing violence when he kissed me in parking lots. Naturally I never told him any of this, but as a matter of perseverance I’m sure he and two other men loved me that winter. I did not know then that it was odd for a 25-year-old to lure a 19-year-old to bed — a bed in his parents’ house, then a guest bed in his sister’s house — when he got off his job at Lowes. This felt perfectly in-line with my trajectory, what I was supposed to be doing when not coaxing my roommate to eat something other than a can of corn and $15 handle of vodka. He broke up with me over text, I threw myself into the student newspaper, then a skinny, short boy who would hold my hand as we left philosophy class. He lent me several hoodies I never returned, and I had sex with him until he told me he loved me and I determined I couldn’t do anything but ignore him for the rest of my life. Nonetheless, I remember wondering if I could marry a short man, if this was my life. Then back to the student newspaper. Work, work, work. Many nights in a fluorescent hallway, fingering the gray carpet and whispering into the phone the whole, I. Can’t. Do. This. One night, after covering a student protest, a boy walked me back to my dorm and kissed me, suddenly. This was the sweetest moment of that year. His dorm room smelled entirely of garbage but it allowed me to climb the steepest set of stairs on campus and observe, so viscerally, the campus I had grown to know in the past year. I never felt afraid. This boy and I, we went to church. Then I took his virginity, and I determined I couldn’t do anything but ignore him for the rest of my life. He asked if we could have one last kiss which I, cruelly, found pathetic. Especially sad because he had once carried me home when my heels were too bruising, and no man would ever do that again. Work, work, work. I suddenly woke up to the fact that my life had been rife with problems. My mother was a drug addict. How did I not realize this before? I did, I did. I started making both more destructive and more impressive decisions with this knowledge. I went to a conference in Atlanta and ate brisket and began telling everyone all at once that my life was a tragedy. I drank cheap wine with strangers and decided, weeks later, to aggressively kiss a boy I had just decided to love. Then I took him back to his home, crashed into his cheap blue sheets, and I told him he was weird, and we saw each other for the next year, just like that. Me thinking he was weird. Me taking him home. Those girls from the first year, at that point, had melted into background noise. But I lived in the attic of S’s mom that summer, which is astounding now that I think of it. I moved into a home with humid green trees, a grand staircase, no furniture. And my bedroom, larger than the one in Queens now, had two windows that framed the bed and buzzed with cicadas. I went there every weekend, and I have no memory of what exactly that meant. I became editor of the student newspaper for no reason at all, except for that I wanted to feel something. I went to New York City for the first time as an adult and drank chilled sangria in Harlem, radiating terror.

Three.

This was the year of machinery. Synapses in my mind click, click, clicking to remind me I was knocking out my minutes and careening toward the end. I made big promises that that are difficult to think of now. I ate so many meals in bed. I was playing dress-up at 20 years old, with all those adult meetings and tears and assumptions that life began and ended with the student newspaper, with my own thoughts. In some ways, I was half-right. I grew my hair long, met with professors constantly. Studied, studied, studied. After all that swallowing of misery, I began the fast climb out of the pits, desperate. I do not remember if I wrote this year. I do remember that I fell out of love quicker than I had fallen into it, would go weeks without talking to that man, would try to end our relationship over and over to no avail. Everyone hated me this year and I could feel it cloaking me, that dismay. I started drinking white wine out of coffee mugs, laying in bed watching documentaries all weekend and thinking about how I was on fire. Big, magic, the life waiting for me outside. This was the year of optimization, the year of Girl Boss. I am sure there were many cardigans in my closet. I sent many emails. Too many emails. I started to have the impression that I was becoming something bigger than myself, bigger than my past, bigger than this school. I kept crying in meetings. This was mania, pure mania, after all. I worked until 4 a.m. some nights, slept until 8 a.m., went to class, never anywhere else. I was made to constantly meet with old men who didn’t care for me much. I went down the hall to sit in Ian’s bed, nightly, drinking beers in silence, thinking that I had never been so exceptional. Every once and a while I completely lost my mind, but never quite openly. I would sometimes get phone calls late at night, a message from the newspaper printing facility saying something had gone wrong, and I’d drive barefoot back to that tower where we made the thing nobody read so I could I’d fix it. And maybe it’s the prospect of fixing that made me feel so unrecognizable and knowing that year. There was so much that was broken, after all. I forgot my one-year anniversary with that guy, yet realized I was fine doing the same thing two years in a row. I do not remember when I discovered I had gotten that internship. I do not remember when I realized I’d move to New York after all. I do remember that before all of that transpired, all of that hope, I cracked and slipped back into angst. I went home and pressed myself into the ink-stained jeans I wore throughout high school, bought magazines on foreign policy, lied to my parents. I was 21. I met with my ex-boyfriend at a Coney Island, laid in his tobacco-scented scrawny arms, and kissed him, shaking with anticipation. A reintroduction to my 15-year-old self after all those nights spent pretending there had ever been anything else, and many more nights trying to forget. We shuddered with all the years we had lost, and I slid under his body again, and we watched skateboarding videos on a thin mattress on his floor. Before I left for New York, I realized it would unlikely work in the long-term. Then I hit his friend’s car on accident, moved to an unfamiliar city, and for whatever reason, slept in the same bed as my ex-boyfriend every night for three months in an apartment that smelled like new paint. He pissed in an Uber. I developed an odd relationship with a comedian named Alec, who I saw once in person, like a mirage, getting off the 2 train and walking away from me. I discovered a new egg and sausage sandwich at Clark Avenue, and I wandered about with Seth, slowly losing my mind. My calves, though, were hardened by all the nervous pacing I did that summer. I got a plane and went back home, with the newfound strength to wear slip-on vans with sheath dresses that hit below the knee. Four.

My room in Athens was haunted by cicadas, rainy mornings. Always impossible hot, yet I surrounded myself in blankets and pillows. I still drew on my eyeliner thick. And my bathtub still clogged with hair, soaking my feet in cold, gray water. I still felt those minutes click, clicking away but I also felt desperate to gain them back. The first night, a Friday, I wore a tank top and met Reba at a wood-paneled bar called Tony’s, drinking white wine, thinking: just like Manhattan. I met my ex-boyfriend from sophomore year thinking: he’s not gay, I think. And I had sex with him half-heartedly that night in one of those dingy college-guy rooms, with the bad sheets and a handful of the posters and the sense that this is all fading fast, just for kicks. But he only lived up the hill from my home, and I knew I could stumble on back to my own bed before 2 a.m. And I did just that. That morning, I ate three scrambled eggs on a plastic plate. I prepared an three boxes amount of pasta because I was determined to have people like me that year. I walked it over to the home of a boy I knew only marginally, named Alex. I wore a black shirt, patterned shorts, sandals, and that thick eyeliner. I was still in a fit of insanity from the night before, thirsting for all my new bad decisions. His roommate was tall, lanky, wore black pants and a short-sleeved button up shirt. I thought: he’s balding, and covering it up with a hat. I thought: he’s odd. He came up behind me when I was drinking my second bottle of red wine in the basement, all caked with alcohol, all under the glare of an ex-boyfriend from my sophomore year. I was playing Danzig, and he made some comment I was too drunk to process. I went up to that yellow-lit kitchen and tried to clean the dishes I had brought. I wanted everyone to eat pasta. I wanted to clean up everything as if I had never been there. I wanted so badly to stop thinking the past three years were for nothing. The boy, the roommate with the hat, stopped me and told me I didn’t have to wash the dishes. Don’t worry about it. I asked him if he wanted to kiss, and he nodded and leaned into me, and we feverishly toppled onto the front porch. I took him to the same bar where I was the night before, kissed him, and he took me into the other bar I was at the previous night — the wood-paneled one — and walked me home. Inexplicably, we sat in my bed while I talked about the summer I had just crawled out of. I told him about the articles I had written, Manhattan. Does this sound impressive? Does this make me likable? He did not kiss me goodbye. He merely disappeared down the stairs, long legs carrying him back to the kitchen with all the dishes I wasn’t allowed to clean. I knew his first name: Michael. And he waved to me the next morning, sat behind me as if I had not disclosed all those things and kissed him on his porch. He left without a word, turning to walk beneath the tall oak trees flush with summer, stepping into that flickering light. And I loved him, honestly. Would’ve died for him. But I spent the next few months tumbling into his bed, trying to deny that. Trying to pretend I was still my productive self from the year prior, but always thinking of him and wishing I were beneath him. One autumn night I ran out of his home, terrified of him, and straight into a field where I laid down without my phone. I thought: I hope I die. Instead, I told him I loved him that January. Instead, I replaced some of my ambition with his Friday nights. I spent my last night of college on his floor, watching heat lightning ripple across that Ohio sky, and was unable to figure out whether I had been incredibly stupid or incredibly astute these past four years, falling in and out of love with many things and people. I did not talk to my roommates from the first year anymore. I did not talk to my roommates from the second year. I was hardly talking to my current roommates, having practically moved into Michael’s. I was still doing the student newspaper six days a week, but part of me didn’t feel as committed because I had gradually become less insane. I thought. I did not write my name on the wall with the rest of the people who had worked there, at the same time, did not say goodbye, because I thought: these people still hate me. And I drove out of Ohio without any tears.

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