It’s an
expanding sort of in love that rises like dough in my chest, and it is light
like dough too and sometimes it feels like I’m flying. Other times it is a lead
weight. Sometimes it is feverishly hot. Often I cannot recognise myself inside
of it. It has grown beyond me into someplace else, you see.
When I was
seventeen Lauren was eighteen. I am twenty eight now and she is twenty nine now
and she is married and sometimes on her Instagram account she posts pictures of
her dogs or her husband. Once, she posted a picture of her sitting in a doorway
with an effortless ponytail that was bleached in a salon to make it look like
it was bleached by the Californian sun. My hair has been bleached by the
Californian sun before, but my hair looked uneasy there and I looked uneasy
there too. I was a square peg trying not to be a square peg. She is breezy and
shaped liked the Pacific and her teeth are white and they are probably bleached
too.
That
Californian sun has somehow made its way inside of her and she glows that light
that happens right before the sun sets. That sudden burst of gold. She is a
sudden burst of gold, and it must follow then that I am filled with rain.
I am a
cupboard beneath the stairs and she is a roof terrace where people come to throw
parties to celebrate getting good news. We’re having a baby. I got a new job.
The cancer is gone.
Once, she
chose a boy instead of a summer in Paris. Maybe she wants to forget that now.
Perhaps she already has. Or perhaps everything she has done since have been
stepping stones to get her further away from the girl who would choose a boy
instead of a summer in Paris, but probably not. I wonder if she ever thinks
about him. Jason. Ever looks him up on Facebook, or lets herself imagine, just
for a second what it all would have been if that summer hadn’t collapsed under its
own weight. Maybe she does, but most likely she doesn’t. She is too happy for
the frivolities of her early twenties now. And besides, so much has changed, so
much of herself is already different.
I have often
wondered if she would like me were we to meet. She is prissy and private and I
am prone to crying in the gym. My clothes have holes in them. I am difficult
and loud and sometimes I am quiet, and recently I swore in a church without
meaning to because also I swear but not because I think it’s clever. I am needy
if I don’t get attention, and I am needy when I am getting attention because I
am frightened of not having it again. I don’t always want it though, but you
won’t know that because I am not always good at explaining how I feel. I have
spent most of my time on the outside of most things and even if she liked me I
wouldn’t believe her when she said she did. I am deeply flawed and she is
breezy and shaped like the Pacific.
But I am kind
and I try my best to be good, except for when I can’t because my stomach is
filled with the giant-ness of the world and I feel too small. Recently, I’ve
felt too small more often than I haven’t and that can be disappointing. Lauren Conrad makes me feel small sometimes
but really it isn’t her, it is me reflected back on myself.
She is just
a girl in California making the most of things after all, and I am just a boy
filled with bad weather trying to figure out why he’s not doing the same.
