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Me, Myself, and I - Chapter Ten
My dreams that night varied. From drowning in cheap nail polish, to being swept away to rainy cemeteries and being kissed by a dowdy black haired blue eyed sweetheart. It seemed peaceful when that part came along in the dreams. Remembering the moment of intricate beauty I had never once felt in life, but then the picture would start to melt and over this shoulder, a tan hand came up. Followed by a grinning highlighted brunette with a gleam in her bright green eyes – just as she would appear, Justin would vanish. And I just sat in a pit of darkness for the longest time wondering when I would be able to escape. Hoping sometime soon I would wake up. But that didn’t seem to happen for lifetimes. So I just sat there in the silence. Completely and utterly alone.
When I was finally awakened by the loud crash of my mom once again dropping her coffee pot and a loud groan, I couldn’t help but groan myself. I was aching all over and felt like I had been hit over the head with the cooking utensil mom had clumsily dropped. When I finally got out of bed and looked around, I noticed something. I noticed I was still fully dressed, showing I must not have changed out of my clothes when I had collapsed onto the bed. I must have been so tired, I just fell asleep right on spot.
And I also noticed I was in my own little self-denial. I couldn’t keep Justin out of my head, and yet every time he came in, I was hoping that he would disappear. Because I didn’t want to seem any more pathetic than I really was. I had no chance to ever be more than an acquaintance to him. If I was lucky. If life was in my favor, maybe I could make it up to a friend that sometimes got waved to when we saw each other in town, but other than that, I couldn’t see myself doing anything including him in my life, other than wishing I was better and could actually deserve him. But we all know that isn’t going to happen.
I changed out of my clothes quickly into a plain t-shirt and jeans and walked out of my room, still with matted black bed-head and some smeared mascara that gave me raccoon eyes. When I walked out of my room, I came into the view of my mother in the kitchen failing miserably with an attempt of sweeping up her broken coffee pot with my father holding the dust pan while she tried to get the shards of glass inside. Both of my parents were in their bed clothes, large t-shirts and a pair of sleep shorts that they obviously just threw on like I did. Both of them, from my mother’s black hair to my father’s dirty blonde mess, had the same matted look that you get from sleeping on one side all night in bed. With a collection of slobber if you slept with your mouth open. Luckily mom was the only one that really did that. Dad’s hair was too short for the saliva to reach anyway, unless he rolled over.
I walked into the kitchen and waved, grunting a good morning to them both. They were both still leaned over with their little cleaning duty still in mind as they smiled and said “Good morning,” In unison. They were such a happy little couple. They still sat on the couch together when they were both home, and they’d just lie there together, watching TV. I never noticed until now just how much I envy them both. The connection they both have. I would never find someone that I could connect to, at least not as well as they did. Finishing each other’s sentences and hugging one another in the morning while mom tries to compete with dad’s height (Have I mentioned I get my height disability from my mom…?)
I finally mumbled back another hi and looked down at the broken glass lying on the tile, “Smooth mom.” I muttered, smiling weakly to her and chuckling. My mom just blushed and finished another load of glass into the trash can while Dad continued to sweep up the last remains in the corners.
“So,” My mom said, pulling her head out from the pantry as she got ready to dump in another pile of glass, “How’d you get a hold of Justin again?”
“Justin?” My dad echoed, glancing up, “Justin Simmons?”
“Yea,” My mom said, grinning, “The one from her elementary school.”
“Huh…” He muttered, looking down at the last of the small glass shards in the dust pan. “Didn’t his mom pass away a few years back?” I couldn’t believe he could say that with a straight face. Even if I hadn’t known Justin’s mom as well as I could have, I could still feel sympathy for her because the image of Justin and his hurt eyes would flash before me. It was a passive moment of flash-backs, but they were cut short when my dad yelped from stepping on one small shard of glass that they hadn’t noticed. I turned and walked back toward my room while my mom started to search through the cabinets for a band-aid.
I walked back into my room and looked around as I plopped down on the bed again. My room was actually still clean since I had cleaned it two days ago out of boredom when I reached home. Only to be swept out the door the next morning to see two long lost friends. One that hadn’t changed a bit, putting things on his nose and teasing about my height. And another that had morphed from a shy sensitive little boy, to a confusing open ended boyfriend of an evil she-witch. I lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. We’ve been living in this apartment for as long as I could remember. I didn’t know why my parents didn’t upgrade to a house. I mean, my dad had gotten a pay-raise a few years back, and mom switched to a seemingly better paying job. In a way it didn’t make sense. But in other ways, I was kind of relieved. Because… Well, if I had moved over this time period… More than likely… Jack and Justin wouldn’t have known where I lived. And I guess that would be a total bust.
You know.
With my new found romance for the black haired boy that I used to share sour-straws with back in Elementary school. I guess I was happy that we hadn’t moved after I realized that. If we had moved to a new location, neither Justin nor Jack would have found me. And I wouldn’t have known that there was still some hope of having true friends again. And that was the most relieving news I had gotten over this two day period full of anger, jealousy, and… Well, new found loves. But everyone should know that love can be painful. That’s a simple matter of life.
“Um, Key,” My mom said as she came into the room, looking around astonished at my room which she had just now come in to see was spotless. She had to come back to reality before she came inching in and sat down on the edge of my bed. She reached out and put a hand on my leg as she smiled at me, “So did those boys change at all from what you could tell?”
I blinked at her, she was being more straight-forward than she had been in a long-long time. She has a tendency to beat around the bush when it came to things that were kind of… Well, touchy. “Well,” I murmured, sitting up and looking at her laugh-lined face, “I guess so. I mean, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
My mom just nodded in agreement, ‘Yea, that’s for sure.” She murmured, probably thinking back on things that she had been through in her thirty-two years of life. Maybe she was thinking about dad, I’m guessing he probably had to straighten up before they had me. Cause from what my mom said before, he used to be an over-the-top goof-ball. (Now he’s just a regular goof-ball.)
“Justin,” My mom continued, smiling back up at me, “He’s… Kind of cute, isn’t he?” I knew where she was going with this. And of course, I couldn’t even make a good alibi. I just lay back down on my stomach on my bed, staring at my book shelves, “Yea he is,” I murmured, “but don’t get me started. He’s already taken.” I paused, slowly turning to look at my mom who was still smiling.
“… I mean,” I muttered, sitting up again before flushing in the face. I was always a bad liar, so why try? I sighed and shook my head as I started to tell her the tale of my heart-break.
The lovely maiden,
With her beautiful face and hair,
Flawless features,
And how she had Justin hook-line-and-sinker.
By the end of my confession, my mom was nodding like a shrink. Her chin rested in the palm of her hand and nodding repeatedly, I could also see her finger to the side making little shapes in my sheets as if she were writing notes.
• Note: This child needs to get a life.
By the end, after mom finished with her little shrink-cosplay, she was basically laughing with how piteously she was looking at me with her wide grin. She was always so charismatic, and she was always even more animated when it included my humiliation. A crisis with a boy (Which let me tell you, is a rare situation), appearance issues (Even I care about my wardrobe… Most of the time), and problems bitching with girls (… That’s another story).
“I know how that must feel,” My mom mused, rubbing my back since I had sat up to tell her my tale, “Romance is like that. It’s full of drama and pain, but when you find the person that you want to spend the rest of your life with, I promise you, it’ll be all worth it.”
That’s when it hit me.
Did I really like Justin? Or was this just a term of jealousy?
You know, like in that Mean Girls movie. Wanting the guy just so you can see another girl cry.
Was that all I was in this for? Was I just some skank ridden Regina George that was hungering for Justin, just to see Alyssa tick?
…I wasn’t completely sure honestly. In a way, I knew I liked Justin. Because of whom he used to be. The way in the mornings before school he would take my picture on this camera he got for his birthday (When the teacher took it away once, he got REALLY ticked…) and also, just the way I could tell him everything. He was like a girl companion to me. (I actually had Chel for that, but sometimes she was too worked up over her hair to notice I was even standing there.)
But he was changed now. He didn’t care about me; I could tell right from the get-go that he harbored absolutely NO feelings for me like I did about him. He just saw me as a little miniscule of his past that wasn’t worth looking back on. That he could just shrug off and leave behind.
I’m guessing that that is the most reasonable possibility for why I started crying at that moment. I couldn’t believe it, I was shedding tears in front of my mother who was sitting no less than a foot and a half away from me on my bed. She saw the tears at once, and before I knew it, I was sobbing into my mother’s arms.
This must have dragged on for quite a while, because once I ran out of tears to shed, with swollen eyes and a runny nose, mom had a tear stain on her night shirt the size of a tennis ball if you didn’t include the bits of run off tears I had smeared when I used her shirt to wipe my eyes.
“Oh sweetie,” My mom crooned, going into her mother-daughter mode as she pushed some of my black hair behind my ear that had been treading over my eye. “I know how it feels,” She began, smiling at my pale and now runny face. “Everyone wants a romance, but it comes with consequences.” Mom smiled and rubbed my head, “You don’t know how it’s going to end. That’s the way life goes hon.” I didn’t respond. I didn’t know how to, because I wasn’t sure that I understood what she meant.
Love is supposed to be something magical that we all wish for in life, that if we somehow found it, we could die happy. How could it be evil or bad in any way? I mean, I’d seen in movies how love can be something bad… But, that’s a movie. They never get the real hint of reality. No matter how many awards they might win. So I just nodded to her, sniffing once and wiping the tears away as I looked up at her with a forced smile, “Okay.” I croaked, “I get it. Thanks.”
“No problem honey,” she leaned in, kissing my forehead, before walking out of my room in that whole “I love you and that’s all that matters” kind of way. Like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants dramatic. I rolled my eyes once she left and turned away from the door, hugging my knees and sitting quietly.
I don’t know how long I sat there in the silence, unsure about what to feel, or even how to react to the noises I was hearing from outside of my door. Which I’m pretty sure was my mom dropping another glass cooking utensil. Probably a bowl or something.
“Honey!” My mom called from the kitchen outside, “Could you come in and help mom clean this up!?”
I paused, glancing up with a raised eyebrow, that woman was incapable of holding a dustpan and putting the contents in with a straw attachment to the end? Either way, I got off bed and walked out, helping mom by sweeping the stuff into the little plastic dust pan. “There,” I finally said, dumping the glass shards in the trash, “All better. No more dropping glass junk, okay?”
Mom just paused before laughing and nodding, “Fine fine. I’ll be more careful.”
I wasn’t so sure I could trust that, but who was I to say whether she was being truthful or not? Mom was unpredictable… Just like… -
… Well, you know.
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