23-32//Responsibility//420
At 17 I was esctatic. I wanted it all. The good, the bad. The image of perfectly propotional love. I remember kissing his lips in the August drizzle, staring down at the city below, and I felt cool, accepted, and romanticized. I ran to my best friend. It was the epitome of teenage dopiamine.
I remember the knot hardening my stomach as I realized his invisiablity was my rejection.
I remember telling him that he was an asshole, that I wanted him to die, that I would call the police if he contacted me again.
I remember asking him to make love to me.
I remember him becoming my partner in crime, my secret between the sheets, the smell of forest and musk and the ant bites that covered my arms.
He taught me to overindulge. To lie. To cheat. To steal. To be who I wanted to be- or at the very least pretend. I followed him around like a shadow, quiet, observing his seemingly iron grasp on what life truly was: freedom. He was the muse I painted so ideally in my mind, dropping his name like it was a medal of honor, holding his friendship like a trophy I had won. Most influencial at 17, 18, 19. He was danger and life. I wanted his acceptance more than anything, as validation that I was who I wanted to be. I aspired to be his chaos. I learned my most detrimental values through him.
I found myself beginning to fade away and to disappear. Just as he had taught me to do two years earlier.
We run in circles. That's what I thought while I breathed in the Ironbound's polluted air, counting the shining stars in the sky to calm my reeling, hallucinagetic mind down. He took me outside away from the people. He gave me his coat. He sweet talked (his most promienent talent) our way past the security guards, the bouncers, the bosses, and protected me from their authority. For once he submitted to dominate forces.
He promised me he would protect of me, "as he always has," he said. And truthfully he always has, in some sense of the word. I heard the manic, 19-year-old freckled kid with the shaggy hair lying through his teeth back on the parking garage roof top. But I saw the heartbroken 25-year-old man in front of me looking me in the eye with the first glimpse of sencerity. I saw the adult who was paying his mother's bills and caring for his baby nephews, just like he was caring for the 23-year-old baby in front of him.
Finally, I was recieving the love from him that I had silently begged for for so long.
So that's why I smiled when he asked me out tonight and I turned him down.