I heard today that you joined a sorority. It doesn't matter how I heard it doesn't matter why I heard it doesn't matter why I care. I spent the rest of the day picturing you with them, with dozens of photocopies of the sorority girls I know, and i wonder what ever happened to the girl you were, the one I knew, the one I was in love with. I wonder what ever happened to the girl who believed in faeries and rainbows. I wonder how many lies you had to tell, how many stories you had to hide, in order to get there, in order to become one of them. Maybe you didn't. Maybe that's who you are now and that's where you were going and maybe I should've seen that years ago. I wonder how much you've told them, i wonder how much you tell yourself, and I wonder how much you've made yourself forget. Do you ever mention me, in passing? Does anyone ever remind you of me? Do you ever come out with a crazy story about who we once were? Or has my entire existance been erased from your memory? It was five years we were best friends, three that we were soulmates. Five years we spent sharing every possible minute, three we spent sharing every possible thought, dream, hope, desire... Do you ever tell them about how you were? Does it ever matter? What if one of our songs comes on the radio, do you remember me? Do you think about who I was, how I laughed, how I felt against your body when we lay in bed together? Do you ever wonder what became of me? Or do you hear, through roundabout sources, pretending not to care, the way that I do? Do you ever tell them the things you told me? The things you bury deep down inside? Do you ever tell them you wanted to be a writer? Do you ever tell them that you wrote your first novel when you were 11? Do you ever tell them that you gave up on your dream when you were 14 and your dad made it perfectly clear that no daughter of his was ever going to be an English major? Do you tell them how crushed you were? How much you cried? How, when you cried, your best friend would hold you, for hours, until you were okay again? How sometimes, she did more than hold you, how sometimes we didn't just sleep on sleepovers? Do any of your sorority sisters know that when you were 14 you pledged your undying love to another girl? That back then forever didn't sound as naive as it does now, forever could be over in a heart beat, forever meant lying in bed dreaming together, it meant mentally picking out furniture for our apartment in Seattle, Seattle because we both loved the rain, the apartment we were going to paint with blue and green swirls, because those are elsewhere colors, elsewhere was the word for it, when "love" was too scary and "sex" was unthinkable, when we were in bed we were "elsewhere" and elsewhere had colors, they were blue and green, and elsewhere was warm and rain and dark and all the wonderful things we knew all thrown together in a twin size daybed. That was my daybed, that was the bed that I pushed against the wall, so that the back was out and the wall made the fourth side and we had to step on a pile of books to climb over the railing and into the bed and I much later told you that the bed kept my ghosts out, and you told me that was brilliant, you told me that made sense. I look at that bed now and I wonder how two people ever fit in there, and I realize that in my memory we're bigger, in my memory we're adults, we're not two very scared thirteen year olds pretending to know what love is. Do you ever tell your new friends how fucked up you were? Do they have any idea? Do they ask where your scars came from? Or have they faded by now? When they ask about your family, do you tell them about the horror that your family really was, or do you play it down, tell them the good stories? Do you ever tell them the story about how, when you were 13 and first weighed 100 pounds your mother told you that she hadn't weighed that much until after she was married? Do you tell them that you, being the good little girl that you were, dutifully stopped eating until you became 5'2" and 83 pounds? Do you tell them about the time on the beach, when your mother cried and told you that she didn't love your dad anymore, she told you she was unhappy and wanted to leave, but was staying for the kids? About how guilty that made you feel? Do you tell them about the times your dad would disown you? Tell you you were a terrible daughter and a shame to the family? About how he rewrote Darwin for his own benefit, and told you over and over and over again that only the strong survive and you have to be strong, you have to be tough, your family is tough and he won't have any weakness in his family? Do you ever wonder how he did that to you? Do you ever look at 13 year olds and marvel at how small they really are? We thought we were so grown up, we were, really, we dealt with things our parents would never have even dreamed of at 13, and yet we were still just kids. We believed in faeries, we recited Yeats, "Come Away, O Human Child, to the waters and the wild, with a faerie hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand" and felt wise, we felt we understood how "full of weeping" the world really was, we knew because the weight of all of it was settled within our chests, right behind the breast bone, a sinking weight that held us down and kept us from flying. Do you tell them how liberated you felt the first time you cut yourself? How at first, it seemed like this was it, this was how you could handle it without losing it, how you could handle it without help. Do you tell them about the nights you spent, alone in your room with a razor blade? What do you tell them? Do you sit around and talk about school work and boys and going home for thanksgiving? Do you get dressed up together, go to frat parties together? Do you get drunk and bring someone home? Do you remember when you vowed not to do that? When you turned to me on the school bus and made me solomnly swear that if I ever saw you drink or smoke I'd shoot you? Maybe you just forget all of it, maybe that was the only way you could cope when I was gone. Maybe you just had to white it all out, pretend it never happened, maybe you even convinced yourself it's true. Can you listen to Sarah McLachlan without thinking of me? Do you remember me on Halloween? When you see someone with green hair? When someone talks about lesbians? Does your heart flinch when you hear the word? Are you afraid that they'll know your secret? Are you afraid that they'll care? How do you remember it? How do you think it happened? How do you justify it to yourself? When your new friends make fun of dykes, do you think back to the time we made love in front of the fire place all night long? Do you defend it or join in? Or do you just sit in the background and hope they don't notice you? I wish I could grab you, I wish I could shake you by the shoulders and say what the hell are you thinking, what the hell were you thinking, do you remember what you did, what you promised? I want to know if you meant it at the time. I want to know if you were acting. I want to know if I seduced you, if I was wrong. That's what they told me, you know. Everyone, when they found out, assumed it was all me. They told me over and over again that I was the one who was wrong and somehow you just came along for the ride. I know that that's not true, I know that with every fiber of my being, I know that they weren't there, they didn't see you ask me, they didn't see you make the first move, but I did. I know you knew I wanted it. I know that's probably why you did it. I want to know if you did it just for me. I want to know WHY. I wnat to know if you looked in my eyes and lied to me when you told me you loved me. I want to know how you went from promising me forever, writing me poetry, planning a life together- to growing up, moving on, and dating guys. It's not that I didn't move on. It's not that I want you back. I have my own life, I have a new person a new town a new job a new school... It's not that I think that could have ever worked out. We were both too young to understand what we were getting ourselves in to. We were both seeking comfort from the nearest available person. And maybe that's all it was. And maybe it's stupid to ask these questions, maybe we really were just too young, maybe it was just a stupid mistake. But three years isn'tjust a stupid mistake, did you pretend for three years? I can't believe that, I can't. I have believe that you thought you loved me. And then, once I believe that, I have to know, where the hell did you go? How did you get from being that girl that I knew, only five years ago, to being the girl that you are now? Which one was real? Can you really change that much? How do you work that inside of you? How do you get the inside to match the outside? How do you reconcile who you were with who you are now? Are there lines? Are there continuums I'm not seeing? Was there a conscious choice somewhere to be a different person? Do you really, in your heart, believe that we didn't know what we were doing? Do you remember being able to finish my sentences? Do you remember knowing my body as if it was your own? Do you remember caring more about me than about yourself? Do you remember when we crossed over that line? Do you remember being half of a whole? Do you remember when your world didn't seem complete if I wasn't there? Do you remember when you could anticipate my thoughts, because you knew them so well? I know that you will never answer these questions. I know that I will never even ask them of you. I know that you have moved on, I know that to admit I even have these questions to you would be proof that I haven't, and you might be right. But that doesn't stop me from wanting it. We were once a whole unit, I was once not whole without you, and whether or not you've managed to forget I haven't. And I want to know who you are now, I want to know who you've become, I feel like without knowing that I'll never be able to make sense of who I've become, of how our relationship fits into who I've become. It was a Big Thing. Despite the fact you dont' want it to be, despite the fact that you ignore it. The two of us started at very different points, and then merged, for a very long time, into the same time feeling person... and then we split again, and moved out, and became two very different people... and somehow I feel that I could find truth in who I am now by knowing who you are. I feel as though who you've become could have been, with a different toss of the dice, who I am. I feel as though, if we were once one, we still are somehow, there are still elements of that. Those five years shaped you into who you are now as much as they shaped me into who I am now. And somehow, the same experience shaped us differently. And I can't make sense of that, I think that a lot of it comes from the other things that have happened, the other places we've gone, the other things that have shaped us separately... but I also think it's because we had the same experience, but not the same eyes. We saw things different, you took away something different than what I took away, and I want to know what that was, I want to know what you found, i want to hold it up against what I found and see if they fit together, how they fit together, I want to know what you have to make sense out of what I have. I think that you would appreciate that, if I could tell you. I think that if i could explain it to you you would understand and help me, I think that you would come away with as much as I have. But I think that that is not what you want. I think that you don't care to make sense out of it, you want it gone, and that is why I will never ask you these questions, I will never hunt you down and corner you in a dark coffeeshop until you talk to me. I think that I still love you too much to really try. ~me previous index next