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werewolf
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i met her during the summer vacation of my 8th grade year. she was beautiful. she was the type of girl my friends, if they had seen her, would've hyped as being so fine that i should doubt my chances but of course not theirs, and if i had described her or shown them a picture, accused me of making it all up or forging it all somehow. normally, at that time and still, i was more into unconventional beauty. i thought that a girl with a secret scar or a slight slouch had something inside her that was sculpting her body. i thought that if a girl had long legs or thick hair or a crooked nose, it should say something about her soul, that she should match her body. that's when i was attracted. but this girl, was just like how all of the magazines say a girl should be. and it helped that seeing her in a bikini and how it made me feel taught me more about sex than any lecture i had ever received, but it wasn't this which attracted me to her. it was that she had eyes which seemed like what i'd seen of mine, and something she said that had blown me away. it isn't something which will seem like much to anyone reading this, and sadly it doesn't seem like much to me anymore, but at the time, i felt lifted to somewhere i belonged. after we had introduced ourselves to each other mainly to kill the inevitable tension of people sitting as close as they do in this hotel and any hotel's hot tub, we had been dicussing what songs we liked. she had brought up a punk cover of the simon and garfunkel song mrs. robinson which was popular at the time but that i had never heard of. i told her i knew the old version and like it. and she said "i love the part where they say cucucachu." Now whenever i had heard, and still whenever i hear that part of the song, with it's corresponding guitar surge, it reminds me of those moments in the day when i am unreasonably happy, happy for nothing that i'm touching, but for some mad burst or spill inside of me, usually leaving as soon as quick as it came. and that she seemed to know this made me think, though it was probably just me being very lonely or hopeful for thinking so, that she understood everything, that she knew about my family and my friends, and my dad and what i thought of life at the time, how it seemed too short and important to waste but also too fragile and chancy to even attempt or at least attempt too enthusiastically. and so i guess i felt somewhere that she should've understood why i didn't kiss her back, should've understood that i was afraid too.
we had been talking all day. we had walked along the beach telling each other about our lives, and i felt that we told each other everything that mattered. i didn't need to tell her that my dad had died or a million other details because she seemed to agree with what i took from it, with what it made me. and we exchanged both aristocratic i'm charmed laughs and the type of guffaws that shoot soda through your nose. and as we walked the beach grew slowly darker and we were increasingly and then finally alone and there were stars. and the talking stopped and she faced me and there was a moment of screaming silence. she looked at me and then the sky and stepped closer saying, "look, you can see orion's belt." i clueless, but not so clueless to not be nervous said, "i don't see anything." now she stepped even closer so that we were embracing, so close that her lips traced her words on mine when she said with a muted courage, "do you see what i'm talking about now?" and though i'd like to say i kissed her and thought it hurts like a bum knee from some graceless trip down the stairs to tell anyone this, the only honest way i can end this story is by saying what happened next. i managed to stutter out, "i still don't see it." she went quiet and stepped away and said she should go home, and so i walked her there, but it was in ugly silence, in which i grasped for words we both already knew i didn't have. i saw her the next night and asked her to come out with me again that i wanted another chance to see her as if she would know what that meant. i really wanted to tell her that i had it all, that i had everything she wanted, held shaking within my chest but was too afraid to open it for her because of some unforseen consequences, that i was afraid to move in case i opened some pandora's box on the other side of the world. that i was stifled because i had built naievely before but couldn't again after i'd seen it all crash. and for the longest time i couldn't understand why she didn't give me that second night. now i see pretty clearly that it must've seemed like the sad consolation of we can still be buddies that everyone dismisses as prolonging the agony, extending the rejection. i never saw her again. and now so much of my life seems like begging that girl for a second night, a time to do it right,a chance to make myself understood; and consequently accepting resigned that not many people or situations have patience for someone too cowardly to admit the stars when they're there, actual, fresh, and not a safe memory.
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040209
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