to begin:
***
Pause. Breathe. Stop. Think. Panic. Blink. Gasp. Question. In this one moment, I feel everything. Every emotion imaginable. And the questions arise like an army at attention. They march forth with such fury that nothing I've built to protect my heart can stop them. It's just the beginning.
If he lied to me about this for years...bold face lied, repeatedly...what else did he lie about?
Did he ever love me?
When I listened to him, with childlike eyes, were all his stories fiction?
All those trips, where was he really? Who was he with?
Was anything real?
If it was all lies, did any of it really happen?
When he held me for all those years...I let a stranger into my life, my bed, my heart, and my memories.
Like a vanishing act, my brain starts erasing everything. But the foot soldier's march never misses a beat. The questions keep coming by the hundreds.
I crumble inside and shake my head. This is it. This is what I'd waited on. This is when the other shoe drops. What I had feared since it all started nine months ago.
But, lets start at the real beginning. The chances and choices that shaped my way. The journey I chose, not the hand I was dealt.
***18
The number we wait on all our lives. It symbolizes everything: lottery tickets, cigarettes, tattoos, porn, freedom, adulthood. Like a feral cat uncaged, I tore into eighteen like any young artist. I craved experience, and attending Herron School of Art as a commuter from suburbia was just absolutely absurd. I needed the city, and knew she needed me. Under very sketchy circumstances, I arranged my move from home about as quickly as I had made the decision. With an attitude so obnoxious, only peers would understand, I explained to my mom how perfect my plan was.
"Now, when you get a job..."
Her ramblings fell into a din of nothingness as I stared around my childhood home. Berber and checkerboard wallpaper, roosters decorating two rooms and quickly consuming a third, ball jars, tobacco tins, steam trunks, and plaid living room sets...it was as if one tiny ranch home could truly encompass every hoosier stereotype. It was bad enough to live just feet from Ol' US 40, but did we really have to be that red brick home with green shutters and a porcelain Sinclair sign hanging on the garage door? My father's hot rod memorabilia was proudly displayed in our attatched garage now turned "bonus room". Never mind those extra cars in the drive, those were for parts. We eximplify it all, proudly here in the heartland. Indiana made and I wanted out.
At the time, the furthest I could imagine was a little neighborhood names Broad Ripple. Only six miles north of down town Indianapolis, I would be close to school and right in the middle of a city I could barely navigate.
One friend, two cars, and a box of trash bags made my move possible. It was a secret mid day operation. My parents were away at a family reunion that September afternoon, and my brother was living in Cincinnati at the time. This gave me a solid four hour window of chaos. Literally, everything I owned went to trash bags and then into my teal GrandAM. Clothing, records, art supplies, knick knacks...everything was making its big move from Walnut Drive to Compton Court's apartment 21.
This bohemian two bedroom had stolen my heart from the first night we met. Through friends of friends of lovers, I had met Kelsey and Rhys the previous summer. My best friend at the time had been dating Rhys before she moved away to college. Somewhere around August, the bottom fell out of their young love and also his stability. With no job and no money, Kelsey was quick to find a replacement. She and I had only met twice. She knew me as Kiki and that I was a freshman at Herron. Apparently those were the main interview questions because when she asked me to move in, I too was without a job. But, fearless and positive I could find work, I promised to have September's rent in exchange for the second bedroom. I spent two days cleaning and painting the room, after Rhys' three months of destruction. Even with three coats of primer and a couple coats of paint, "SEX" was still visibly carved into the wall above my bed.
Now, as for how 21 stole my heart...