Too Many Characters

The Half She Left Behind

It is a short flight from Cleveland to Washington, D.C. - just under an hour. I was supposed to stay longer on the campus, to decide if the money they were offering was worth it. I thought I would be there another night, but around noon my phone had started ringing in the restaurant, over and over. 

The man next to me wore a dark blue suit and was powering down his Blackberry. 

“It’s not too bad a flight,” he said, nudging me with his elbow. I tried to smile, but the corners of my mouth were frozen in a grim line. I stared out the small oval window at the tarmac.

“Do you fly often?” I asked. 

“I make this trip a couple times a week,” he said, pushing his legs out straight, under the seat in front of him. “Why are you flying to DC?”

“Oh,” I said. My brain whirred but I wasn’t sure what to say. No one wants to hear these kinds of things, you know, especially not during small talk, but I settled on the truth.

“My best friend died this morning,” I said. “In a car crash.”

~

Senior year of high school, we are in AP physics class for two and a half hours together - an extended block period for advanced science courses. She somehow convinced our teacher to let us go buy ice cream sandwiches - that girl could talk her way into or out of any situation - and we practically skipped down the steps of the school to the front entrance. 

We looked like opposites; she wore brightly colored, flowing clothing, and dripped with small accents of jewelry. A bluish-green moonstone necklace embraced her throat. I had given it to her almost two years earlier and she wore it every day. It would be thrown off in the crash, and another friend’s father would walk up and down the highway for hours until he found it, handing it to me in a small white envelope at the wake.

My clothes, on the other hand, were brown and closely tailored – pinstriped pants that a twenty-something would wear to the office, chocolate brown loafers. Her hair was a rich, coffee brown, with hints of red, and lay smooth and flat down her back. My hair was wild, light and curly, twisted up in a clip. We left the classroom together.

“You want to hear something weird?” she asked, as we descended the cement steps in front of the school and began to cross the parking lot.

“Always.”

“You know when we drew that graph and at the top he had labeled ‘Impending Motion’?” I nodded

“Well, I looked down a couple minutes later, and instead of ‘Impending Motion,’ I had written ‘Impending Doom.’” She chuckled to herself, and I sort of shook my head at her. “I just thought that was really funny.” 

The cool October air blew our clothes and our hair out in billows, and she unlocked the small white Civic, folding her near-6-foot frame in behind the wheel. As she turned on the ignition, loud rap music blasted from the speakers and she rolled down the windows to the afternoon breeze. 

After we’d returned to school and finished our ice cream, the bell rang to end the class and I threw all of my things together, headed out the door to lunch.

“See you on Monday!” she called, and then she was assimilated into the bustle of the hallway, echoes of lockers slamming and students yelling to one another. That one moment, short as a blink or an intake of breath – nonchalant, beautiful – was the last time I ever saw her alive.

~

I sit to write the eulogy and my brain is full of static. What can you say to other people about the intensity of the bond, the pain of it severed? She was going to Yale in the fall, I could say. Smartest girl I ever knew. Sarcastic; sometimes even cruel. But also loving. Thoughtful. Kind. I’d be sitting in the papasan chair in her room, reading, and she’d notice the goosebumps on my arms and cover me with a fleece blanket.

She was tortured, internally, as was I. We were both seeing shrinks for our “issues”. My parents were so often gone that I spent most of my time at her house, with her family. After the funeral her mother held my head in her lap and stroked my hair. My voice in their house, she said, made it seem like it was only a dream. 

We’d been here before, together, almost exactly a year earlier. Our mutual friend’s boyfriend was murdered, beaten in the head by a group of high school boys, died in the middle of the night. She and I had sat, curled against one another, until dawn. Her blue eyes would fill with tears and then spill over. We’d been here, and it had been awful, but she had been with me.

“YOU ARE MY LIFEJACKET,” she wrote, the first line of a letter one summer. The letter had come enclosed with a CD she’d made, and I opened it in my tent at summer camp and smiled. I remembered the words after her death and they haunted me at night. I imagined her drowning, her last breath. I imagined her head going through the windshield, hitting the pavement. 

~

I return to school only to retreat into the bathroom, sobs clawing at my throat, tears burning under my eyelids. We should have had more time.The ‘shoulds’ overwhelm and nearly crush me. I can’t shake the image of her casual wave goodbye, the way she was enveloped by the crowd and disappeared. Disappeared, just like that. Gone forever.

I go through all the motions of senior year. I start drinking heavily with friends, taking shots of vodka until the room tilts and I don’t see her face any longer. I take all six of my AP tests, get all of my credits. I get into all of the colleges where I’ve applied, maintain a perfect GPA until graduation. I go to orientation and look at all of the smiling, happy freshmen. I am an outsider. Loss runs through my veins.

~

Seven years to the day that she died and I meet her mother to run a 5k along the river. We would run here during crew practice, glare at the white caps on the water that meant we could not row. I am still here - now a college graduate, now an adult - but still tethered to her, to her family. 

“She loved you, even more than if you’d been her own sister,” her mother tells me, her arm around my shoulder. “You two were something special.” 

I start to cry. I feel small, afraid, alone in a lonely world. The wound she left behind when she died has scabbed over, but it still aches.

I am the half that is left of something special. 

I won’t forget.

Bi Bi, Baby

“I think I’m gay,” I say, and my mother’s face is totally immovable; I cannot read it at all. Are my feet still there? Yes, I think so.

“Okay,” she says.

“You tell Dad.”

~

It is Halloween, and I have cropped my hair to my chin because Jaime likes it that way, and we are watching Chicago in my living room, limbs askew on the couch. Her long blonde hair is fine and straight; I twist it around one of my fingers. Jaime is a student at a local university; she plays soccer and has pale skin, like milk. I am still in high school, and my best friend Evan, who I will later go to senior prom with, has been out for two years. We stick together.

I don’t talk to my father about this, ever. He never meets Jaime. He left my mother the summer before my freshman year and now I see him once every two weeks, maybe. He is dating again and they are more important. My car breaks down and he’s with one of them, so he won’t come.

My mother is at work until 2 am, some nights. She is working too hard, for a boss that screams at her, because that means six figures, because I still need to go to an Ivy League school, even without Dad. Who needs Dad? She always made more than him, anyway. PFLAG envelopes come in the mail, but she never has time to read them. Anyway, she is gone all evening and I am home alone, or with Jaime. Usually with Jaime.

“Will you come to my regattas in the Spring?” I ask her. I am on the rowing team, Junior Varsity Eight. Last year the women’s Varsity team won Nationals, and Canadian nationals, and then went to Henley. 

“Of course I’ll come, baby.” She kisses the top of my head. 

We finish watching the movie and hand out candy to the last few children in costumes. Then we retreat to my bedroom, the door shut tight. She awakens my passion.

~

There is a boy, in my AP Chemistry class. He’s also in my AP Latin class. He’s going to go to MIT, everyone says. We exchange phone numbers, and he comes out with me and Evan and Megan, and we drive around the city in his car; I’m still too young for a license. 

“I had a nice time,” he says, as he walks me to my front door.

“I had a nice time too.”

And then he is kissing me, in that awkward, high school way; urgent, and nervous. I break away and smile tentatively, then rush to open my front door, keys shaking in the lock as I turn it. When I close the door, I put my back against the window and slide to the floor. My cheeks are already wet with tears. 

“What do I do?” I ask Erin. Erin is a crew coach, a teacher at the high school, and a lesbian, who sponsors the GLBTS alliance. She told me her coming out story when I first started dating Jaime. 

“I’ve always found it’s more important to vote for the candidate than blindly for the party,” she says. 

I cry harder, and she hugs me.

~

I am bisexual. I do not throw my sexuality around like a toy, as many women will just to attract attention. I am not going through a phase. Bisexuality often means disbelief, even from the GLBT community. Some say I’m greedy, or scared. Or that I’m just not sure yet.

But sexuality is not a diametrical thing, or a straight line. Some women like men, and some like women, and some like men and women, and some like handcuffs and whips, and some like tender, dull sex with lots of cuddling. It shouldn’t be important what someone else likes in bed if you’re not the one they’re fucking. 

My bisexuality is sometimes still confusing to me. It’s of no consequence when I am being monogamous, because committing to a person is about a thousand times more about their brain then their genitalia. But sometimes people ask me questions, and I do not always know how to answer. My experience is probably different than it is for many other women and men, but I don’t think it’s that extraordinary, either. 

It’s simply part of who I am.

xo,

Honey

Cruel, Cruel Summer

Uh, oh. Honey started a tumblr. (Not like she hasn’t done this before - though very few of you know that, don’t you?) Well… There is no good place to start except from the beginning, which is impossible because then we get into that whole “when does life start” debate, or from right now. So I guess I’ll start from right now.

I am “enjoying” my first day of summer vacation, which essentially means that in the 6 hours since I woke, I’ve eaten breakfast, gone to the gym, had a few orgasms, watched some Hulu and showered. Also starred a fuckton of tweets. Yeah, maybe even yours. So… I’ve done almost nothing! And this is what worries me.

See, you could never really call me a high-energy type of person, but I have enough frenetic anxiety during the school year that it keeps me going. As a child and adolescent I mostly filled (or had filled for me) my summer days with activity and high-stakes achievement. I had to get into all of the best schools, you know. Once I was at said school I stayed busy nearly working (and starving) myself to death, until obviously I graduated and became a bright-eyed, young teacher in a high-pressure, inner city job where I kept not-eating and seeking accolades for my “exceptional work ethic and intellect.” 

I transferred from the inner city and have been teaching at a good school now two years, where the people are mostly nice and the insane pressure has somewhat lifted. (I’m still able to make my own life miserable, don’t worry!) I am among people with much higher work ethic, who have far more accolades than I, so most days during the year are just about keeping up. But now the summer has come again and I am sitting here in my disastrously messy living room, concerned about doing nothing.

I can see you rolling your eyes at me. Poor teacher, nothing to do for ten weeks except sleep and play on Twitter. You’re not alone, I’m sure. It’s okay. You can stop reading now if you want. Because I know what you’re thinking: You can’t be sad because of SUMMER. Summer, you’ll say, is when people go on family vacations and lie on beaches! Summer is when we go to camp, and catch fireflies and sing songs around a campfire! Summer is when there’s lots of sunlight and joy, and even depressives are soaking it in!

But for me, summer is heat. It’s 100 degrees today, and with the humidity you can’t be outside for more than a few minutes without sweating profusely, like you’ve been jogging. So I stay inside. And inside, summer is the silent tick of the clock in my empty apartment while everyone else is at work; the air conditioner’s whir to keep me company. Summer is peace and quiet and no obligations, except for all of those things I said I’d do, since now I have the time. Summer is the long hours alone with nothing but my own thoughts, clamoring in my head: Stupid. Weak. Pathetic. Useless. Lazy. Ugly. Fat. 

Those thoughts. I won’t bore you with details now, but even before things started happening to me I remember them, awake late into the night at age 7, my eyes wide and watching the bookshelf above my bed, convinced that it would fall. The thoughts make us curl up into ourselves like we have exoskeletons, and they made me, first, work and write, then later, starve and cut, then, even later, drink and fuck. They made me run. And some people spend their whole lives running. Some people die running.

After almost a decade and a half sitting across from shrinks, I’m finally tired of running. Imagine that. No more running! Don’t get me wrong - that would be easier (sometimes even fun). Running - in one form or another - got me on the varsity crew team, got me into an Ivy League school, got me a competitive fellowship and a free professional license. But running from the thoughts has also almost killed me. Many times. 

So maybe this time, summer is time to string just a few of the thoughts together into sentences, and hold them up to the light for everyone to see. 

Honey