Letter to a friend
It's been a strange few days.
I always forget, going into it, how much I hate summer. It's my least favorite season. I always manage to convince myself that I'm a summer-girl, all careless salty curls and lemonade and tanned arms, but I forget that it's really a horrid time for me. I don't know that I've ever had a summer I've purely loved since I was a little kid. Maybe the summer before sophomore year, when I took Geometry with all my closest friends and was writing and doing things I liked. But even then, I seem to remember a generous slick of bitterness.
I forgot how hard it is to even exist here.
Part of it is the summer; I stagnate, without school - its necessary mental obstacle course, its enforced interaction with people other than my family. The heat makes me careless; I don't wash my face in the morning, my chest breaks out from the humidity, I can go for days without brushing my hair. Everything is still.
It reminds me so much of being a teenager. I forgot what that was like. Somehow I lost that girl when I came to Williams. I became dreamy, trusting. I have always wanted; I remember, now, how visceral my desires were. I spent my teenaged years in a veritable agony of longing for... well, everything. You know that part of The Bell Jar where Esther is sitting underneath a fig tree, and each branch, each fruit is a possible future, and she can't choose, so she starves? Well, it's like, when I'm here, all I can do is wait, because choosing isn't an option. I just sit in the tree's roots, animal-hungry. It's terrible, but I forgot how keen it makes me.
What I missed most were the mountains and fields. The beaches, funnily enough, I can do without. I had been back almost a month before I finally swam in the ocean. I like it more in principal, and I like it in the winter, when it's steely and furious (not this aquamarine, glassy, lukewarm bullshit) and I like the sea.
It's the mountains, though, that I missed. They loomed over so much of my childhood that the absence of them was disconcerting. They're a dream-scape in and of themselves. No one lives there. There are no public trails. I've heard there's a Catholic monastery up in the hills somewhere, and I remember once when there was a forest fire and flames licked their way, in the night, like lava trails across the fields, I cried because they had to evacuate the nuns, but I've never been there. My grandmother went to Easter services there, once. I don't remember if she said it was pretty or not, I remember that everyone got home late and breakfast was cold.
Those mountains, their green slopes and bluish hazes, became a symbol for everything I wanted. There were days I'd stare out my window at them, just wishing. I was fervent. I should've taken up religion, I would've been the perfect convert. I still don't know what those mountains are like. I don't know that I'll ever go up in them, see them from any perspective other than the streets I've always known, my little town, the highway that hugs their curves for the shortest possible period of time. But I'm glad they're there.
I forgot how bone-crushingly lonely I am here. These are my people, but they aren't my kind of people. I'm too keen, too tightly-wound, too sharp-edged. I can't play at the lazy indolence that passes for virtue here. I am off-putting. I am too genuine, maybe. I am not welcome. People ask me where I'm from originally, and it hurts so bad, I can't even explain it. Remember when I said I was a vagabond? A gypsy siren lost-child? I wondered, at the time, where that feeling came from. Now I know. Home is simply a word I've learned. There was the one house, the beach house that I grew up in, the one I told you about. That was the last time I felt belonging.
I'm not coming back. I've already decided. It's just too much. I'll visit, spend the two and a half weeks of Christmas break working on my tan and maybe stop over in the summer, but I just can't stomach this anymore. Maybe I'll rent an apartment in Chinatown one year, spend the season doing some smart internship and drinking in bars with military jarheads and Samoans who like my figure but can't stomach my rhetoric. I don't know. But this house is not a home, or at least, not my home. They're counting down the days. No sense in getting settled, in making my own little corner. I'll only be here for two months, after all.
It shocked me to realize how little I own here. I brought my clothes and makeup from school. If I were to leave tomorrow, I would pack those up. I would take my books, and my great-grandmother's quilt. I could leave the rest, it would only weight me down and I wouldn't miss it anyway. I'm going to bring my books with me to school, I think. All of them. Not just Grimm's Fairy Tales and The Great Gatsby and poetry, but the novels, the paperback thrillers, the bargain-bin hardcovers. It'll cost a small fortune, but they belong with me. After all, a vagabond needs to keep her belongings intact. Williams will be my caravan. Homeless people have their grocery carts; I will have my standard-issue bookshelf and milk-crates and shoeboxes.
I read too much here. I used to see it as an act of cultivation, but now I see that it's cowardice, pure and simple; it's warding off the ennui, the despondency, the realization that I have done nothing since I left Williams. My five-year journal is gapingly empty for weeks at a time; I'll never be able to fill those days. I remember some of them - on the Fourth of July I went to the beach and read a mystery about bees and then sat in my aunt's carport and barbecued. The third Tuesday in June, I went to the dentist and had that missing chunk of my back molar that I lost over Spring Break filled, and my mom yelled at me for not walking my brother off the city bus. On my birthday, I went to breakfast, got dressed up unnecessarily and ate pot-roast for dinner. My cousin and aunt came to visit and the photos are universally unflattering. But there are stacks of days, little cells that will never have meaning because they were, in effect, unnecessary. I'm sure I filled them with books and television and soporific pondering.
It is almost two a.m. and I am sitting at the kitchen table in my underwear and my tie-dyed entry t-shirt. I tried to sleep; I had been reading for hours, so I thought I'd be tired enough, but when I turned out the lights my heart was pounding so hard and quickly that I decided I needed to do something. I'm sorry if this letter is too much. I'm sorry if I unload all my self-pity on you. I'm sorry if I am again the tragic heroine, the shut-in, the girl who more than anything wants to be loved. I can't help it. Winter makes me sharp and contemplative, broken glass shimmering in the dawn light. By July the tides have worn me down until I'm misty, lumpy, opaque-green, fit only for trinkets and baubles. I want so, so much. I can't help but be impressed by Belle at Fifteen. How did I stand this? Sometimes I want to scream. A lot of the time I want to smoke cigarettes, because I feel like that'd be the last big fuck-you in this whole twisted scheme, but my ID's expired and I haven't bothered to get another one.
I think about next year a lot. I wanted to come back thinner, but I don't know if that's happening. I don't feel any different, even though my body's been given a break from tuna melts and french fries. I'm going to whiten my teeth, because they're awful. I had terrible ear infections as a kid, did I ever tell you? I was probably on antibiotics from the time I turned four until I hit puberty, it's why my teeth are yellow. I tried to whiten them once but I stupidly bought the gel trays and that was just disgusting in every way. I need to cut my hair; I'm thinking about trying bangs again, although this time I'd make them cut them way thicker than they think necessary.
I want to die my hair. I would like to be a red-head, but I feel that it's posturing to do so. Every girl who has ever dyed her hair has at some point dyed it red. I think black would make my eyes look blue and my skin pretty. I think blonde would make me look more exotic. Once I played Goldilocks in a show, and I had an incredible blonde wig with curls and ribbons and it made me look, for some reason, incredibly Chinese. I need to wax my eyebrows. I want to stop caring so much about what people think of me. I want to stop thinking I'm ugly or ungainly because I had a poor run with guys this year. I don't want to think about guys at all, sometimes. College is not a great place for romantics.
I want to get up early. I want to write my papers at my desk instead of having to go to Sawyer. I want to take singing lessons so that maybe one day I can do something more than sing in an a capella group. I want to be charismatic, compelling, luminous. I want to smell good all the time. I want to go to the gym. I want to make strange, maybe beautiful art that means something to someone. I want to narrow down my study-abroad options from 'everywhere' to 'one particular place which I love'. I want to wear high-heels. I want to make a place for myself. I want not to hear Liam Abbott hooking up with girls next door (I'm his neighbor. Lucky me.) I want to live in Faye without all the seniors hating me. I want to be a fox rabbit crow serpent cat. I want to feel purpose, I want to have meaning, I want my life to make sense again. And now, I want this letter to end. I'm sorry if I've said too much. I love you.