Months - Lloyd Lane
It’s December of my sixteenth year and for the first time in my life I have a girl who tells me she loves me and I am drunk on the way it makes me feel. Not the way she makes me feel, but how being loved by someone makes me feel, how, for the first time, I am wanted and important and there is someone to ask about my day and someone to tell about my day and someone to spend my days with and then after, I recount to her the day we spent together.
It's January of my sixteenth year and for the first time I’ve got something to do after work, someone to meet me in the parking lot, a thought curling around me while I teach children on Saturday mornings whose mothers would clutch their pearls if they knew who I was dating, except we’re not dating, not quite, we are something else entirely. I don’t know how to define it, but if someone ever puts it into words, I will nod once, begrudgingly concede, and I will very deliberately not text her about it. And this girl and I, we go on dates in dive bars and hold hands under the tables and she pays for my dinners while we watch the drunk adults on the east side of the town I grew up in, the side by the river, the side that floods every spring, get even drunker while they watch basketball on Sunday afternoons. And they yell at the players and the TV and they yell at the waitresses but never once do they yell at us, a pair of teenagers with wind-kissed cheeks who fight over the bills and never drive home while it’s still light out. I have never felt closer to heaven. I have never been further from God.
It's February of my sixteenth year and we exchange Valentine’s Day gifts the Tuesday before in a chain restaurant parking lot while I really should be studying for my precalculus exam. The next day I find out I got an eighty, and my cheeks flush with pride, quite like they did when I was sitting in the booth of the restaurant and she’s bought me a scone, this girl, and I’m studying my books and my equations and she is studying my looks and my expressions and she tells me “The way strands of your hair fall in to your face when you’re concentrating is so beautiful” and I am so full of love I could burst, as if nothing she could do could possibly endear me to her any further.
It's March of my sixteenth year and the girl and I are in another parking lot. I’ve gone from seeing her one, two times a week to five and we no longer go out for dinner or watch the stars, now, the girl and I, we mostly pretend. It’s all we do. We pretend her backseat is big enough for two grown girls who hate the way their bodies move, the obscurity of it all, gangly limbs and elbows and knees, bruised arms draped over fumbling hands and sweaty shoulders. She hits her arm on her seatbelt buckle and I pretend I don’t see her wince. I become indifferent to her pain. We pretend the snow isn’t melting. We pretend we’ve an endless amount of time stretched before us, that somehow, the steady turning of the Earth will be stopped for two teenagers who now keep pillows in the backseat so no one hits her arm on the seatbelt buckle and winces, but mostly so that no one has to pretend she doesn’t see the other wincing and that winter will go one forever. We pretend we won’t rot like food left out of the fridge too long when the ice turns to water and the east side of the town I was raised in floods and the bars we held hands under the tables in won’t be covered in a quarter inch of water, foundations shaking like my gawky knees. She pretends I’m not young and naive and unworldly; I pretend she’s not old and careless and hotheaded. We both pretend the other will change.
It’s April of my sixteenth year and I’m trying on prom dresses for a dance I know she won’t be able to take me to, fantasizing about matching my gown to her tie, and I let the fabric swish around me, hating the way it hugs my frame and I joke about wanting to go in a suit instead, and how I don’t want to disappoint my parents, except I am very serious about both of those things. Madison’s mom takes me shopping and pays for my dinner and helps zip up my dresses, and I wonder what it’s like to have a mother like her, and I know you wonder the same thing too, and I think about how you wanted me to be that for you, just a little bit, but I couldn’t, and I am sorry about a lot but I am not sorry for that. It’s April of my sixteenth year and the girl and I stay overnight together, playing house for the second time, mimicking the good role models we didn’t have and screaming at each other the same way that they used to. My younger self listens from the railing, staying up past my bedtime to eavesdrop on my parents’ one-sided shouting matches. It is the most kinship I have felt towards my mother in years.
It’s May of my sixteenth year and the girl hasn’t called me in nearly three weeks and I am pretending I am not at all bothered by this new arrangement we have, because I am a lot of things, but mostly I am stubborn, and I am in love, but more so the first, and so I decide I would rather die than be the first one to pick up the telephone and ask her why she has decided she doesn’t care for me anymore.
It's May of my sixteenth year and I get a phone call in the middle of a play, and I know it’s from her, I just do, because who else is that brazen? Who else thinks they’re more important than my friend’s show? And my first thought is that someone died, something tragic has happened, but no one did, and nothing has, it’s just you, and I almost wish it did, because I’ve decided the only thing worse than not hearing from you is hearing from you sporadically. I answer and make polite conversation and hate myself fiercely for doing so.
It’s June of my sixteenth year and I forget to call you on your birthday, forget you even have a birthday, which is shameful of me, I know. I can’t conjure up any feelings of remorse.
It’s July of my sixteenth year and I drive through your town while on a family vacation and try not to think about my history here, the weight the ground holds, the roads you let me drive on, the people I was naked in front of, and the ghosts I lived with, the ones that follow me to this day.
It’s August, I think?
It’s September and I am in the final month of my sixteenth year and I am back at school and you are back at school, and I don’t miss you, not quite, but I do miss the cigarettes you used to buy me at the gas station that didn’t card in the town that raised me, and I have also grown weary of living in the town that raised me. I miss wrapping my lips around something that I know could kill me, and yes-- most times that means cigarettes, and yes-- sometimes that means you, and I don’t know what that says about me or my sense of self preservation. I think I’d light anything I could on fire as long as I know I’d get to be there to watch it burn. It’s September of my sixteenth year and someone who looks like you walks by me and for a moment, I cannot breathe, for a moment, I am a person I stopped being months ago, choking on clouds of smoke you paid for, throat painted red by the hand I worshipped.
It’s December again, and my friends are home from school, and when the offer arises, I do not turn them down. I am taking one from the pack, I am raising it to my lips,
I am promising to quit
I am promising to quit