89: box
When I am seventeen, we are newly minted freshmen, too exhausted from childhood to follow through on the plans to recreate ourselves that we drew up all summer, drinking in the heat and feeling at the curious edges and boundaries of our oncoming freedom. The fever passed before the summer, and we find ourselves abject and terrified in the face of what's left, clinging to whatever we knew when we were children.
I reread more books in one semester than I've read in years, trying to remember mere months ago when I knew everything and had perfected myself. I try to remember being good, when all the world seems to require manipulation and jealousy and terrible rage. His name is Rob, he is from the Northeast, his hobbies include socialism and obscure punk rock; he is deeply unhappy and needs someone, anything, as long as they don't acknowledge his desperation. He is perfect.
We lie in his roommate's bed, kissing softly without tongue, slowly building walls of afternoon denials and midnight desertions between us. Only in the roommate's bed, never in either of our own, because that would be a declaration. Our fumbling is never in the service of something better, it is only fumbling, but it represents a light at the end of some tunnel somewhere, and so we keep going.
"Time is like this," I tell him: "We've only met. We think we have made the friends we'll have forever, now. That it's easy as the movies. But I say that we will be disappointed in ways we can't even imagine just yet. By the time the winter comes we will have made enemies of our friends and made love to the people we hate most."
"That's only like two months away," says Rob, and laughs. He's right, but so am I; I don't know how I know it, but I know it. This is only a temporary respite in the illusion of comfort. I don't speak about it again: Just watch it happen, as it happens.
Staring down at him, two bodies nestled in a single twin bed as though born there, like twins, I make him say a single word, again and again: "Flesh." It stirs trembles in me; I know he understands the fire, if nothing else. He thinks it's because it makes me laugh, the strange gruff way he says the word, tasting every syllable, but it's not only because it makes me laugh. It also makes me brave. When I ask him what his perfect world, his heaven, looks like, he says, "Another green world." All alone, I think. That's the garden he wants back into. I don't ask again.
I pretend to have forgotten everything I ever knew, in order to hear it again from his lips, from the cruel curve of them, with his opinions attached to facts, blending into his hatreds and his loves, until I have drawn a perfect map of him inside. It's hard to love; loving it makes me better, I think, and submit to late-night pawing. We are sober, but not out of conviction: It's only that each day holds only so many hours, spent devouring each other, that we don't have time for experiments.
Two months later, I'm still seventeen, but everything has changed. Every love is a single day, morning until faded afternoon. I barely recognize him; he pretends to remember nothing, and we are both satisfied by the arrangement. I have woken up to the world around me, thanks to him and the moments he gave me, to be safe, but he's not the one. I never thought he was the one; he never thought I wasn't, but now those boys don't even exist anymore. I'm still going home at the holidays, that first year, before I give up altogether and stay with friends and their families, or hole up in the dorms to be alone. It's a green world, too. Sometimes, late at night, he comes to me, begging me to recognize him. I tell him, we all tell him he has changed too much, but he says he never changed at all. He begs me to believe him, and in that begging proves it true.
When I am eighteen we celebrate, by buying cigarettes at a store notorious for carding, and we celebrate by smoking them. I haven't seen Robbie in a bit less than a year; he's not doing so great. I'm not that much older than him, but since I skipped forward and he was held back, the months have become logistical years. We drink and try not to reminisce. There were so many betrayals in that last year that at times I feared for my life. When it becomes clear that he only wants to talk about those times, that he's gearing up to discuss -- or worse, reenact -- that night we babysat the little boy upstairs, I make sure to leave him with the pack. That was in high school. I don't love him anymore. I leave him behind.
I will never love another sad boy. No broken things. If they bring you sadness let it only be a game, a momentary break in the routine, before the assumption reasserts itself that life is worth living. I have learned lessons, of a kind. In pretending to be happy I have brought myself into a greater happiness, but in pretending to be normal I have realized a happiness I never knew. The old world falls away and I realize we are there, in his green heaven, where nobody cares or judges by our histories; where nobody even wants to hear about them.
I leave him behind; I have Rob now, and all the trouble that brings. We spiral around each other for years, sleeping with the same boys and girls, using everything we have to hurt each other, and without facts we just rely on lies and propaganda, never striking directly. When I am twenty-two and have left that school forever, my memories are vague beyond a general feeling of hustle: Trying, giving up, disconnecting and searching desperately, building social capital and burning it down again.
It comes to me cleanly one night when I am eighteen, and in the half-light I gather everything, moving quietly to protect my roommates: Everything with meaning. Knickknacks and movie tickets, careless doodles I've saved from boys who scrawled my name again and again on whatever paper they could find, little figurines. My diaries, my journals, the half-mad writing of my desire: It all goes in a box, and I take it with me out into the night.