I wasn't attracted to her because she was beautiful- well that wasn't the only reason. I think the very first thing I noticed about her was her length. She seemed to go on forever. She was extraordinarily long, tall, thin... And yet there was nothing awkward about her. She was gorgeous. Graceful too, moving with practiced elegance and poise, almost as if she was a dancer and not a poet. But she wasn't graceful like a swan. As light as she looked, I didn't imagine her extending her wings and flying away. She was grounded. And dark. Not her skin, because it was much paler than mine, but her hair and her eyes and her clothes and the words she spoke that very first night. She was heavy, I guess and her poignant portrayal of a graceful creature trappped in the bounds of a heavy darkness had me drawn to her.
It wasn't love at first sight. I could never be that cliche. Besides, there wasn't anything about her that I loved. I think I almost pitied the sadness in her eyes, or how she folded her piano-player's fingers around the microphone and leaned in to read her poem. She almost appeared tortured in this muted, teenage way. She looked about seventeen too, so I guess it really fit. I found out later that was actually a year older than me, but she still seemed adolescent in her art.
But I was attracted to her. I hit me hard me too, the attraction. She was only the second girl I'd ever felt this for. Oh the things I imagined doing to her while she was standing on stage. Nothing too perverse, but it wasn't innocent admiration. I don't know, it seemed like for a moment, when the room was quiet and we waited those few seconds between her name being announced and her voice filling the silence with literary devices, every molecule in my body wanted to combine with hers. She was wearing this short, black dress with one strap and the strap was falling down her shoulder and although she was pretty flat-chested, the dress gave the illusion of cleavage and it was obvious that she had a nice ass she was just...really, really pretty. When she spoke I watched her lips move and I imagined what it would be like to kiss her. It feels funny to admit that here, but yes, that was a thought that passed through my mind while she read.
I didn't have a date that night but I'd sat down at a table with a guy I'd seen before and pretended like I wasn't totally awkward and unlovable. I remember I leaned over to him when she made her appearance and asked, "Okay, who is that?"
He wasn't paying attention, but instead running the tip of his index finger around his coffee cup and checking his facebook on his iphone. He turned his head to me but kept his eyes on his phone and said, "Who?"
I pointed, casually. "Her."
He looked. "Oh. Um, she read a few nights ago. You weren't here. Her name is Jack or Jackie or Jacqueline, or something. She's totally hot, but I think she's emo or something."
Jack's poem was about a boats and water and love and clouds. I wasn't focusing on the words. I'm sure it was a really good poem because everyone clapped afterwards, but I was much too distracted by the woman reading the poem to actually pay any attention to what it meant. Embarissingly enough, my heart actually started to beat a little faster as I listened. I wanted her to look at me. Of course she didn't. She kept her eyes on the piece of paper in front of her and remained focused on the lines of text. But I wanted her to look at me. The entire performance took about four minutes and then she nodded at us and turned and stepped down from the raise stage and walked back to her seat.
She didn't know me from Eve. I mean, I'd never even seen the girl before then and I was almost positive she didn't even know I was there. But I was intent on introducing myself and telling her who I was and deciphering exactly what sort of force was making me crazy over her. The guy at my table, Daniel, got up to read and in the hub-bub of him standing up and sliding behind me to make his way up front, I lost sight of her. When I looked back she wasn't siting at her table anymore and I decided I'd lost my chance and listening to Daniel talk about shopping carts and empty aisles.
Poetry night, every Tuesday at Porcelain Doll's Coffee House was one of the only things I looked forward to. My life wasn't glamorous. I worked at a used record store that smelled like peporoni all the time due to it's proximity to a particularly smelly Subway and lived on the thirty-second floor of an apartment outside New York's City's city-limits.
I wasn't in a very good place mentally. I was living an extremely repetitive pattern and even though most of what people shared at Poetry Night was cliche and cheesy and kind of, sort of dumb, I liked it. I mean, I didn't attend the get togethers so that I could experience this grand talent...I was happy just to be reminded that there were people that had far more complicated lives than mine.
I moved to New York City the summer after high school graduation. And I moved because I was in love with my best friend. It wasn't a spontaneous decision either. I knew that if the feelings we're requited by graduation, I had to get away before I spent my life pining and eventually withered away into nothing but a bitter being lacking the ability to be happy. Maybe I was too late. Maybe I was already bitter. Maybe, maybe not. All I know is when I saw Jacqueline I was very aware of my want to be fulfilled.
I wasn't innocent by any means, but I considered myself generically good-natured. I was pretty, too, I guess, or at least that's what men told me. Some even called me stunning with my tan skin, my wavy, chocolate hair, my deep ivy-colored irises. But I wasn't. I could dress up and look the part, act the part, make people believe it to be so. I had the ability to cake on the charm and I knew that if I over pronunciated my vowels just so my tongue would touch my lips when I spoke, I could drive a man wild. I knew just the shoes to wear to make my legs look longer and make my ass look bigger and I was just as good at putting lip gloss on my lips as I was at purposely touching a man's arm to make him think I was interested when I was really just wanted some attention. But I wasn't stunning. Sometimes it was all too obvious when I looked in the mirror and pulled and wrinkles that just suddently showed up on day and crawled out of the corners of my eyes, that I couldn't even to begin considering myself stunning. I was mediocre at most.
I guess I'd never really had the greatest self esteem. I grew up comparing myself to my gorgeous, pagent winning mother and my well-endowed, creamy-skinned, veluptuous, blond best friend. I knew people thought I was cute. But being cute next to my mother and Verena Mozart was like being a firecracker next to crate of dynomite.
You see, Verena was the love of my life. She was my best friend, my neighbor, my science partner, my confidant, my shoulder to cry on...She was the reason I got up in the morning. She's the force that kept me going. When I felt hopeless and beaten down, she was the one that held me and told me to get back up and keep going because I was amazing and she was going to kick my ass if I gave up now. I met her when I was twelve and she moved to Buckeye, Maine from some place in New Hampshire. We borrowed each others clothes, slept in each other's beds and as we matured, I developed feelings for her. very real, very intense feelings. And I'm not gay. I know that's a stupid thing to say considering what I've just admited. But, I mean, it was just her. Yes, I was in love with her. Absolutely, unequivocably in love with her. But...I didn't consider what that meant. Because, well, I just thought it was Verena. I just thought it was her and she was the reason I felt that way. I'd read about people being pansexual and I thought, Okay, maybe I'm just in love with her as a person and it doesn't matter what gender she is, and that doesn't make me gay...it just makes me... I don't know. I didn't have a word for it. I couldn't come up with reasons and I couldn't justify the way I felt because I couldn't even understand it most of the time anyways.
But essentially that's why I ran.
Verena Mozart turned eighteen the December of my senior year of high school, shortly before I followed that January. A month my elder but an entire lifetime my predessesor. Everyone wanted to be her and if she hadn't been so damn sweet I'm sure people would have killed to be in her place. Not only was she a sight, she was also powerfully polite, dilligently driven, stunningly selfless and radically romantic. She sported naturally white-blond hair, powder blue eyes and the smoothest, most St. Ive'sy skin I'd ever seen stretched over a body. And everyone just thanked their lucky gods that for some blessed reason, Verena was bisexual and so she wasn't off limits to any gender. Just to me. Because, I was past her boundaries. I was too far in to see the whole picture and when she referred to me as her sister my heart just plumeted into my stomach.
While simultaneously breaking my heart, she was also keeping me together. We had this thing where she would come over before she went on a date and give me a present. She'd go "I'll be home later Beautiful. This is for you."
It always went the same way. I'd be sitting on my bed with my mouth kind of drooping on one side, thinking about her with someone else and she'd appear at my side and wrap her arms around me and kiss my temple. She say something absoluetly adorable like, "Why so glum Gummy-Bear?" And I'd just sigh and give her my big, watery, brown eyes.
"Don't look at me like that," she'd say and shove me, playfully, "I'll be thinking about you the entire time."
The presents were usually stuffed animals or flowers. I'd go, "You don't have to buy me something everytime you go on a date. It's not like I'm some shallow desperate thing that needs material things to remain happy."
She'd chuckle and say, "Pish posh," or "Rubbish," or "Nonsense," and then tell me that she didn't buy the things, she'd stole them and her eternal love for me had turned her into a hardended criminal and I should be grateful that she was on my side so when the time came I could be the Thelma to her Louise or the Bonnie to her Clyde or something just as ridiculous.
I'd laugh, of course and roll my eyes. "You just have horrible taste in dates," I'd say, surrendering to her peristant, pathetic pouts. "Seriously."
She's squeeze my shoulder or tackle me onto the floor and remind me that she'd chosen to sit beside me at lunch that fateful day in the cafeteria and I'd remind her that it wouldn't have mattered anyway because her family moved next door to my family and we were destined to know each other anyways. This was a trap and she'd go "See?" and leave me unable to argue.
I hated it when she went on dates. But, though it happened regularly, she never had a boyfriend, or a girlfriend longer than a week. It always ended the same way. It would boil down time. She chose me to hang out with over them and they'd get jealous and she'd go, "Listen, you're really amazing but I'm loyal to Jod, and if you're not okay with that, we can't be together." They were never okay with that.
It was loyalty that really did me in. Verena was...Well, she was the only one in ther world that mattered to me. I had other friends, sure, and I genearlly loved my mother, although we barely got along and I avoided her a large percentage of the time. But Verena was "the one". I swear, if she had asked me to, I don't know, set our high school on fire, I would have done it. I would have went to the 711 off our main road, bought some matches and some gasoline and just went right to work. I was that devoted to her. I lost sight of what life had been before she carried her Powerpuff Girl's lunchbox over to me and said, "Hey, can I sit here?" I decided, quickly, that life hadn't existed before she came along and it wouldn't if she ever left. Our live's just simply entertwined. Everyday after school I'd trudge over to her house, rummage through her closet, put something "trendy" on and follow her out, behind our family's property to these two, smooth rocks and we'd sit, dangling our feet above the chalky water.
She'd doodle on a drawing pad, and sketch different poses of me from various angles, trying to get the shading right. Among everything, she was an artist. Senior year the varisty girls finally persuaded Verena to try out for the cheerleading squad. She begged me to join her, but my deeply rooted hatred for cheerleading only allowed me to attend the games and watch her jump around in a short skirt with pom-poms and remain convinced that she was so out of my league it was comical. Because with the cheerleading came a long string of courting football players and one love sick cheerleader that just begged to take her to prom. Verena actually quit cheerleading so she could focus on making the decorations for prom, that she ended up being the queen of. We went together and she bought me a corsage and danced with me. This guy she used to date named Tony Jameson won the king's crown. Everyone decided that Verena was much more of king than he was and there was this comical overthrow where a group of our class surrounded Tony and took the crown and placed it on Verena's head. The theme was Midnight in Paris as voted on by the Student Council and so she had this long silver gown on and with the crown she was almost a dead ringer for the statue of liberty. She pulled me out of the audience and awarded me with the Queen's crown and we paraded around the rest of the night acting foolish and teasing Tony, who wasn't too beat up by the issue after Verena kissed him as a cosolation prize.
Anyways she did this huge mural for prom on a gargantuan piece of canvas of the Paris skyline and it was so beautiful that the art teacher submitted it to this artfair and it won. Verena's mother Loraine owned the local artisan center off the rocks and they framed Verena's mural when prom was over and hung it over the check out counter, beneath the high vaulted ceilings. Standing in the lobby, looking up at the painted buildings and richly colored sky I made my decision to leave. I thought, someone that could create something that beautiful could hang the moon and someone that could hang the moon didn't need someone like me holding onto their feet, keeping them from flying.
It all comes back to poetry. I didn't tell her goodbye. I wrote a sonnet and handed it to my mother. I said, "Mother, this town is small and quirky but I don't want to grow old without having lived in the big city."
She returned with, "You're just going to leave then?"
I nodded. "I'm moving to New York and getting a real grasp on high paced life a cultural melting pot."
She wanted to know how I was going to pay for it and I revealed the five thousand I'd been saving for community college and she shook her head and told me to let her know right away my new address so she could wire me some money if I needed it. I said it wouldn't be necessary, that I was getting a job the instant I got settled and thanks for having faith in your daughter. She wanted to know what the letter was and I told her it was for Verena and not to read it because she wouldn't understand the metaphors anyways and it would be nice if she respected my privacy for once.
Ironically enough, this is the poem that I chose to read the night I met Jack. I was two people after Daniel and I got up, carried my sheet of computer paper up to the mike and I read,
"The hardest part of anything is the beginning
Or in this case, and ending to simplify goodbye
So, V is for vertigo and how you keep my head spinning
And E is for escaping without telling you why
R is a letter to signify the rational thought I lack
Another E for entropy as I fall apart at my seams
N represents nothing because without you I have jack
And A is for absolution that meets me even in my dreams
I don't want to come out and admit how I feel
Just understand that me leaving you has to be done
Because love is but passion and a solving of wills
and it's easier to end something that has never begun
I think one day you would have pulled me onto the shore
I never want to be your damsel; I wanted to be your world."
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