I miss you so much, and I don't know what to do with that feeling. Baring my soul has become my new favorite activity when I’m with you, so there are a few things I need to tell you about how it’s been with us since you’ve been in Peru. I get scared when things change, and sometimes I get sarcastic, snotty, and use humor to distract from how I really feel. And yes, I become Petty Crocker. I don’t know how to wait for you, and I’m sorry. Please forgive me, because it's only due to how much I care about you.
When I finished I sent it to her and waited. Lord only knew when she’d get it over there, but it didn’t matter. I had some errands to run, so I left the house for a while. I was waiting in the overly long pharmacy line when I got Annalise’s text. Why was it that whenever I had to pick up mom’s anti-depressants there were a line of senile, old people having trouble with their insurance companies in front of me in line? It was a mystery of the universe, yet it seemed to be one of the few certainties in life. Death, taxes, and old people who had misread their prescription drug coverage plan on their policy, who now wanted to argue with the 24 year old pharmacist while I waited anxiously for a text from my Peruvian girlfriend. A vibration in my pocket.
Bearing your soul
She had a style of texting all her own. I’d grown accustomed to it, but every now and then the idiosyncrasies of her phone communications intrigued and frustrated me at the same time. She did that a lot—repeat back a portion of what I had said in a longer piece or text or letter, and never with any punctuation attached—so I never knew if she wanted clarity, or didn’t understand what I said, or if she was simply repeating something of interest to her. I never knew which it was, and something told me that she wanted it that way. My typical response was to explain what the phrase meant, as if she didn’t know.
Yeah, you know, like telling you all of my deep thoughts and feelings
To which she responded with:
I know what it means
And that would be the end of it. On the few occasions that I asked her why she had repeated my text back to me, she either didn’t answer or quickly changed the subject. Then I’d elaborate, because I didn’t know if we were having a contentious exchange where I had insulted her by assuming she didn’t have a good vocabulary, or if we were having a happy conversation where she was just indicating she liked something I had written, in particular. So, to make sure it was the latter and not the former, I’d usually follow up.
I’m sorry about how I’ve been. I’m sad and jealous over nothing, and just being stupid. I really, really miss you and I needed to explain that. I really hope that the way I’ve been hasn’t changed anything between us, because I’d hate myself forever for screwing things up with the girl of my dreams.
That was my phrase, not entirely original, but one that I always used when describing her. She was the girl of my dreams—my Peruvian goddess—that girl who the universe delivered to only a select few men in history. The one who rights the wrongs, makes the sun shine through the clouds and who forgives you for being a dick when you text her dumb shit while she’s in Peru. You know, that girl.
Girl of your dreams, huh?
This time the punctuation left little to the imagination. My heart did that thing it did when I revealed just a little more than I wanted to, yet somehow felt excited and relieved at the same time. I called her the girl of my dreams, and that carried a particular sort of meaning with it.
Yeah. You are.
There was no point in being coy any more, no point in being shy or holding back. The way I figured it, if I had been honest and raw with my negative emotions, then I needed to be equally honest with my positive emotions. So, there it was, unmistakable, honest, and scary as all hell on my screen and hers.
So, if I ask you something, will you answer me honestly?
I wrote that I would, which was the truth, even if the answer was uncomfortable. And, knowing the preface to her question, it certainly would be.
Like, how strongly do you feel towards me?
And there it was. The question I’d been dreading for a while. The answer was simple and the answer was timeless. The answer was so clear that I was concerned it would frighten her, so I did my best verbal rope-a-dope to stall. I wrote,
How strongly? Like, how do you want me to answer that?
It was a bad stall, I knew. And Annalise was perceptive enough to know it was a stall. More importantly, she was relentless in getting an answer when she wanted one, so I knew I had about thirty seconds to come up with a proper response before the question got asked over and over again. She wrote,
Okay, how about this…on a scale of 1-10, how strong would you say your feelings are for me?
What? Did she really want me to measure my emotions on a scale like that? It seemed silly at first, and then I remembered this time my dad sliced his hand open after he shattered a drinking glass while washing dishes one night. I volunteered to go to the hospital with him, and I remember seeing a scale on the wall with simply drawn faces—like emojis before there were emojis—ranging from a smiling to a crying face. Each increasingly sad face had a number next to it, and the caption above read “How severe is your pain?” I supposed if the medical field used a 1-10 scale to gauge people’s injuries then it must have been at least a semi-valid way to measure human emotion. I played along.
Ok, so I want to tell you, but I don’t want you to get freaked out if it’s higher or lower than you think it should be.
She wrote back,
I don’t think it should be anything, I just want you to be honest. And I don’t get freaked out about stuff like that, I’m just curious.
She said she wouldn’t get freaked out, but I didn’t know if I believed her. Even if she did get freaked out, I still had to be honest. The truth was that there was no 1-10 scale to measure how I felt. I was in hopeless, desperate, endless love with Annalise, and no scale, no matter how high it went, could have ever reflected that fact. I figured that starting conservatively was the best way to go, like in a negotiation. I wrote back,
I don’t know if I can measure on a scale like that, but definitely a 7.
My heart, which had never really gotten back into a normal rhythm since that conversation started, picked up its unnatural pace even more. Funny how the perception of time could differ so much based on emotion. Between the sending of ‘7’ and Anna’s text back, maybe 15 seconds passed, but it seemed like enough time had gone by to elect a new president.
7, huh?
I wrote back,
Ok, like 8 or 9, really.
What the hell was wrong with me? I couldn’t stop. Soon I was going to be composing sonnets and declaring my undying love and freaking her the fuck out, no matter what she said. I needed to slow it down.
Oh, 8 or 9? Really? Can I ask you something else, then?
What could she possibly have asked me after that? I was already about to die from all the anxiety. I braced myself. She wrote,
Do you think that you might, you know, love me? Because I get weird with that kind of thing sometimes. It’s been said to me before and I didn’t know how to react.
The last line couldn’t have been more fitting, because I didn’t know how to react at that moment either. I did love her, of course. I think in some ways I always loved her, even before I knew that I did, if that makes any sense. But knowing that you loved someone and using those words were very different things, and I didn’t know if I was ready to take the leap while standing in a line at CVS waiting for Mom’s meds. Some things—the important things—couldn’t be unsaid, and couldn’t be written off as a joke. Those were final words; words that defined and changed the nature of things, and I just wasn’t ready, emotionally ready, to redefine anything just yet. I thought for a moment before writing back, because I wanted to choose my words carefully.
I don’t know exactly how to define how I feel. I don’t have a word for it, and it certainly doesn’t fit nicely into a whole number on a scale. But what I can tell you is that the sun rises an
d sets with you, as far as I’m concerned. Talking to you and being with you is the reason I get out of bed in the morning, and you’re in my thoughts all day, every day. If you want to define that as love then you can, but that’s how I feel. And even if it were love, there are just some things that you don’t say through text.
She took a few minutes to write back, and in that time I assumed that she had read between the lines of my text, realized that I loved her hopelessly, and promptly blocked me on her phone, or perhaps changed my name permanently to “Stalker” in her contacts. Either way it felt like an eternity. She finally wrote back,
Potato
I sent back my stock smiley-face emoji, the one that meant everything and nothing all at once. I was still learning the meaning of ‘potato’, but I knew that it was better than a multitude of other things that she could have responded with. I’d take potato any day of the week, and twice on Sunday. I wrote back,
Potato.
To which she replied, promptly this time,
No. Just no.
I smiled at my screen. She could always make me laugh. I saw the dots in the corner of my phone, and realized that she wasn’t done writing. She wasn’t as verbose as me—for some reason I could go on and on with really long texts. She could do so much by doing so little. A second text popped up on my screen.
You know, I’m not that special. I’m just an ordinary girl, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about, but I’ll take your 8 or 9. And ditto. So I’ve gotta go, I’m going into the city with Mamita.
I wrote back,
Who’s Mamita?
To which she replied,
Oh, it’s like grandma. She’s taking me shopping in the city. So I’ll text you later on, okay?
Ordinary? Did she know what the word meant? Any other girl would have been looking to be contradicted when she said that, looking for someone to step in and sing her praises, but Annalise wasn’t like that. The sad part was that I felt like she actually believed that she was just another girl. You know, just your run of the mill Peruvian goddess sent to Earth to make me happy.
Ok, text me later.
I heard the annoyed yell of “Next in line,” from the obviously disgruntled CVS employee standing in front of me. I was so lost in conversation with Anna that I didn’t notice the world-shattering insurance issues of the previous octogenarian had been resolved. I got mom’s meds and left, and spent the next few hours at home, relaxing. Mom was having another good day, and we actually hung out and talked a while without anything being weird. It had been some time since that was possible.
After a while I slipped away to my room to do some homework. I thought about my conversation with Annalise from earlier, and I decided that before I went to sleep I needed to be honest with her. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and texted her.
10. And only because you limited me to that. Otherwise it’d be like 15.
She didn’t text back, and I didn’t expect her to. At that point I’d honestly gotten used to not hearing from her as frequently as I was used to, so I just watched some TV, did some terrible and unnecessary homework, and eventually conked out on my bed. I must have left my phone on ring, because the sound of it going off with a text woke me up. I was disoriented, and looked around the room like I wasn’t sure where I was. When I grabbed my phone, I saw it was past midnight, my time, and that Anna had written me back.
At that point in my life I’d been used to bad things. I was good friends with Bad Things, so when good things happened I was almost in paranoid disbelief of their existence. It was a bad habit, but one my life experience had cultivated. That was my reaction as I looked down at my phone. I stared at the words like you stare at something incredible, something that you wouldn’t believe was real. On my screen were her words, her magical words. All they said were:
I love you too
Eight
Where I ask Anna to accompany me to nerd Heaven.
College was an evil word.
The arbitrary concept that was higher education, became the bane of every upper classman’s existence. Parents, teachers, guidance counsellors, even other kids who’d internalized their role in the machine kept reminding you about it. The inquiries on that particular topic came up often and aggressively, and the more you tried to delay their answers in order to just live your life, the more you were reminded of how this was your life. Three words came up more often than they should have—the real world.
I don’t know where the hell this mythological place was—most likely North of Narnia and Southeast of Middle Earth—but apparently we’d all been living in some Inception-type dream world for the past seventeen years of our lives. According to all adults, the self-prescribed experts on this topic, this dream world was soon to go the way of Krypton around June of our senior year of high school, after which we’d enter a new, far more real world for which we were apparently underprepared.
Although the general idea of spending another minute in any kind of school made me cringe inside, it was actually Annalise who inspired my getting off my ass and applying. She didn’t do this directly, and she was totally unaware that I was even filling out the forms and writing the essays, but the inspiration came from her. She loved when I wrote for her, and I wrote to her often. Little notes that I called love letters; notes on my phone that I’d text her; actual letters I’d send to her house, it didn’t matter. Every time she texted a heart emoji, or told me in person how good of a writer I was, she planted a seed of encouragement inside me, and that seed had begun to germinate. I was interested in Boston University because they had this really well known creative writing program, apparently, so I applied there as well as some other places up and down the east coast. I didn’t tell anyone, and really, I’m not sure why I was secretive about it, but no one knew. Not Pete, not Mom, and definitely not Anna. In fact, the idea of talking it over with Anna hit a particular nerve.
As we established, I was a relationship virgin, and I’d picked a weird stage of life to jump into the game. From my observations, senior year of high school relationships fell into two distinct and incompatible categories; there were the kids who planned on ending it all the second those tassels were hanging proudly from their graduation caps, and then there were the semi-delusional kids who saw the end of high school as a minor inconvenience in an otherwise unbreakable bond they had with their significant other. I always thought the last group were just stupid, love-struck kids, but when I was in that position myself, the idea of planning to end our relationship—or even the thought of not being with Anna in general—paralyzed me to even think about. So I did what any self-respecting, emotionally immature kid would do with an uncomfortable topic—I went into full denial and pretended none of it was happening. Fingers in ears. La La La La La.
While Anna was off cruising the Motherland I had some time—a lot of it, actually—to contemplate other aspects of my future that were less disturbing to think about. For all his flaws (and let’s face it, the kid had many), Jason was absolutely right when he said that I needed a distraction from the sadness that had occupied my mind while she was gone. We stayed in touch, of course, but I tried, despite myself, to have some confidence in our relationship, and when that failed terribly, I decided to just think about other stuff. But, like all things, her time away ended and she was back on her way to the northern part of the continent.
It was a Saturday when Anna came back. Actually, she got in late the night before, but I knew the girl needed her sleep, so a few texts was all I got. As I sat in my room earlier that day, finishing up some college essays and supplements for the schools I’d chosen to apply to, I got a call from Pete. Now understand that all of our best friendship communication was done either through text or in-person. There was nothing else, and there were sure as hell no long phone conversations where we poured our hearts out to each other. That just didn’t happen. I think we may have actually spoken on the phone once or twice in our entire lives, so when I saw him calling instead of texting I picked up
the phone right away.
“What’s up? You okay? What the hell are you doing calling me?”
“I know,” he said. “Planning, man, I’m planning. It’s stressing me the hell out.” He sounded frantic. As soon as I heard the tone in his voice I already knew what he was referring to, but I played dumb.
“Oh yeah? Planning what?”
“Our anniversary, what else?”
“That’s sweet, man, I didn’t even get you anything. Are you taking me out to a nice dinner? I’m not putting out, so get that out of your head.”
“You think I want to sleep with you? You don’t think I could do better than your skinny ass?” We both laughed hysterically. “But seriously, I’m trying to finalize some stuff and I need to know what the deal is with you two. I need to make this something special.”
The hotel. In the haze of Peru I’d forgotten to even bring it up to Anna before she left. Maybe forgotten isn’t the right way to say it, because I was aware that their anniversary was coming up but I still had no good way of asking Anna if she wanted to spend the night with me in a hotel room in the city.
“I still have to ask Anna. Do we even have enough tickets?”
“I bought enough for you and a girl a long time ago.”
“Wait, what?” I asked. That was the first I was hearing about extra tickets and I was a little shocked. “How did you even know I’d have a girlfriend?”
“I didn’t my friend, but I hoped. And apparently I have a sixth sense when it comes to your love life, so don’t question it. But you’ve gotta man the hell up and just ask her already.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Away From Here_A Young Adult Novel Page 12
