Everybody's Somebody's Everything

DAY THREE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN: The Pauper Falls Madly In Love

I have no idea how it happened.  Truly and honestly.  All these years I have been searching.  And it's true what they say, it happens when you least expect it.  But suddenly, I'm in love.

It's not quite the euphoric feeling I imagined after years of digesting Disney princess films.  And it wasn't quite as obvious as listening to a musical cue play while two strangers reach for the same book and looking longingly up at each other.  But it happened.

I remember the early days of our relationship.  I was in an utterly lonely place in life.  Having just moved to a new city, I had zero friends aside from my own personal alienation.  And then one day, we took a walk together.  Around the area.  It was late, the sound of summer cicadas echoed through the streets.  We listened to music.  And we walked.  And we discussed our insecurities.  Our pleasures, our pains.  Our fears and dreams.  We bonded in a way few people ever do.

And to think, I was only 12.

I spent the majority of my teenaged years hating my new companion.  She was embarrassing.  In school, she had difficulties adjusting to the changes around her.  Oftentimes she was teased for being herself.  Put down while trying to make new friends.  And she got smaller and smaller because of it.

But no matter how much I distanced myself from her, we still had our walks.  We'd still stroll around Ballenger Crossing, peeping into Kingsbrook.  We'd pass the tennis courts, walkman in hand.  Some times a dog would pass.  Some times we'd pet it.  Some times he'd bark.  But after the excitement of interaction settled, we'd return to our conversations.  Wondering why the boys weren't chasing after us.  Wondering why we had such difficulty connecting.  Wondering what the future would hold.

We attended college in the same city.  Far away from home.  As the city proved an even lonelier abyss than the suburbs, we found solace in each other.  So we'd pack up the Creative Zen Micro, shove an earbud in each ear, and go for a walk to the lake.  This time, armed with pepper spray.

Two years into college, we traveled to Rome together.  The first weekend we were there, we left the orientation grounds to be alone together.  Our desire to travel clashed monumentally with our disdain of small talk.  Of forced social interaction to meet new people.  It's so much easier when it's just the two of us.  No judgement.  No ridicule.  No disappointment.  And besides, we were two pretty rad people.  Enough company as is.

We left college and were forced to forge our paths in adulthood.  We watched our friends fall in love.  We watched our loves fall away.  We watched our dreams age and petrify.  We watched our ages tick away, feeling more and more like Cinderella as we waited for midnight when everything withered away.

But every now and then, we'd still find time to take some walks.  Perhaps even a bike ride.  And perhaps even with a flask tucked into my pocket.  We'd venture to the lake, sit on the rocks, take a swig, listen to music, and stare out into the vast aquatic darkness.  Straining to see the other side.

Until talking no longer felt adequate enough.  And that's when I started to write.

Days before my 27th birthday, I am no longer afraid of being alone.  Some of the most wonderful things that have happened to me have happened because I allowed myself to be alone.  I allowed myself to move to Chicago for college.  I allowed myself to travel to Rome.  But most importantly, I allowed myself to go for walks.  Bike rides.  Movies.  Concerts.  Dinner.  Flights.  Road trips.  Back porch wine nights.  I've done it all by myself.  And without this kind of quality time spent with an individual I spent so much time and energy hating, I don't think I could have fallen so madly in love.

I love my flaws.  I love the emotional intricacies I weave in my brain.  I love my pain.  My pleasure.  I love my failures because they keep life interesting.  I love my successes because I'm not some kind of depressive and ironic douche bag.  I love watching my journey.  There's a glorious satisfaction in fully realizing that everyone is fucked.  Not in the schadenfreude sense (although everyone can relate).  But because once you realize that no one has it figured out, you can sit back and enjoy watching yourself try.

So now I'm going to go out on my back porch, pour a glass of wine, pop my ipod into each one of my years, and have a good long chat with the love of my life.

All That She Wants

DAY TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY-NINE: The Pauper Has A Craving

What do we want?

It’s a question asked of us almost daily.  You ask it in the morning when you search for the perfect shower song on your ipod.  You ask it on your way to work when you dip into Dunkin’ Donuts instead of making that oatmeal at home.  You ask it when your friends invite you out for drinks when you know you have to wake up early.  You ask it when you stare into the gaping maw of the future.  The barren unknown.  What do I want?

This has always been a difficult question for me to answer since the age where ordering chicken fingers off the menu became a hearty blow to my maturation.  I used to be a picky eater.  I’ll eat whatever is easiest to choke down so I can appease my parents before ordering the make your own sundae bar at Max & Erma’s.

But at some point, my palate inexplicably changed.  Food became something to cherish as it slid down my gullet.  And as my experiences with food grew, as did the creeping sense of anxiety when the waitress turned to me and asked, “And what do you want?”

Honing our desires as children is as basic as “this will please me immediately; therefore this is what I want.”  When ordering ice cream, we don’t think about the consequences of weight gain.  When choosing to go to the mall with a new circle of friends, we don’t plague ourselves with insecurity.  When looking for our first jobs, we don’t question whether it will lead us down a path of self-loathing so deep that we aren’t sure if we’ll ever crawl out of it.  Ice cream is good.  Friends are fun.  And money is the bee’s knees.  I want all the things.

But as we age, more questions have to be answered before we can make life decisions.  And figuring out what we want in life becomes a craft.  It’s a strategic mind fuck of a game where we must balance our ids and superegos delicately so as not to break our souls.

One of the less decipherable desires I’ve had in my life pertains to the XY chromosomes.  And perhaps, because attraction is such a fickle and unrelenting mistress, I am not alone.  I have never been in a relationship.  Not for lack of want.  But I tended to fall for men because I loved that they would laugh at my fart jokes.  After 8 high school and college years of thinking blowing into the crux of my elbow and emitting a sound only the deaf wouldn’t appreciate, I came to realize that maybe guys weren’t trying to have sex with “one of the guys.”

So to overcompensate, I lost my virginity to a guy I knew so little that his name in my phone was “Office Guy”.  In a plot twist that would give The Usual Suspects a run for it’s money, “Office Guy” and I parted ways shortly after our initial encounter.

My second sexual encounter was with a guy I had negative 7 interest in.  But after my friend left with her boyfriend, I sat with a newly refreshed Jack and Coke without much of an escape plan.  When he asked me to come back to his place, I sort of shrugged and mumbled as much as one can mumble the word “sure” and slumped into a cab with him.  In a plot twist that would give The Sixth Sense a run for it’s money, I never returned his calls.

After that, I had the only “Facebook official” relationship of my life that lasted a staggering month and a half with a guy who seemed right up my alley simply because he seemed interested in me.  Never mind the fact that he was selfish and immature and made me pay for my own ticket to see a movie I had zero interest in ever seeing in my life.  (It was the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.  For anyone who knows me, there is literally no other genre on earth that interests me less than slasher flicks.  Much less crappy remakes of slasher flicks.)  But I digress...

In a twist that would give the sinking of the Titanic in Titanic a run for it’s money, I broke up with him by quoting a song by Fiona Apple.

Now, I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and...

about the number of guys whom I continued to associate myself with simply because I was so eager to have someone want to associate themselves with me.  But I don’t think I can hold your attention that long.  We’ll save that for the memoir.

The point is, after being turned down so many times by the guys I always truly wanted, I no longer knew what I actually did want.  I would become transfixed by someone who appeared interested, regardless of drunken nonsense.

But over the past year, I did encounter someone whom I truly cared about and who truly cared about me.  It was real and genuine.  And though distance doomed it from the start, it doesn’t change the fact that it helped me hone my desires.

Because you may think that you want something.  You may crave it like a junkie selling their grandfather’s ass watch for one more hit.  But until you get a taste of what truly makes you happy, then you’ll wander around aimlessly until you find it.  And you’ll delude yourself into believing something fleeting will actually make you happy.

So as I sit here and watch the lightning flash every couple of seconds during this June thunderstorm, I don’t feel lonely because I don’t have someone to cuddle up with tonight.  I feel a sense of happiness.  Because I know that one day again, I will find someone who will sit with me on my couch, our feet entwined, and we’ll exchange looks of awe at each other as each crack of light and sound fills the air.  We’ll smile at each other because we know how special every moment together is.  Because that’s what I want.  And I’m no longer willing to settle for anything less.

But until then, maybe it won’t hurt to hit up that ice cream sundae bar after all.

**Please note, due to the storm, my Internet went down.  Therefore, this post was unable to post during the actual storm.  Now it's morning and kinda nice out.**