I'll just say it

Last year, about exactly this time.

Last year, about exactly this time, there was an open mic at the Schuylkill River where I heard a lot of pretty songs for the first time live. Part of it was the stream. Because it was right there, waving at us all, and considering what else we could’ve possibly been staring at— if we were that distracted by our reflection in the water.

The night was funny because my future boyfriend (here we fucking go...) and in the same time, continuously— future ex-boyfriend was there and also most of the members of my future friend group who were his friend group and kinda still are but two of them mostly are for me to keep (my one thing I got to keep) but I didn’t pay any of it any mind because all I could think about was the crush I had at the time. He was the kind where you have to be really careful what you say, or the whole thing could blow up in your face. So I was next to him, kinda scared to move or breathe but I don’t regret it, sitting there on that blanket, trying to do the best thing that I could in the world.

Prim played this beautiful song called “Pretty Baby” and nobody was dating anyone. That didn’t make them more open (I try to remind myself). Prim saw me taking a video of them playing the song and they laughed so I laughed and it seemed like somehow We All Laughed. We were laughing from a year ago today that we’d all date and breakup and try to see Bottoms but end up opening someone else’s mail that got addressed to us in a Fairmount living room and it would be the funniest thing of the year so far— a bright pink children’s fit bit that we’d put around the neck of a bunny whose head closed with a zipper and became a strawberry, we’d later place on the shelf and say it was Global Positioning or like the episode of Zoey 101 where the guys spy on the girls’ dorm with a camera inside a PCA oversized teddy bear, but really what was funny was that we were all together, sitting on the two uncomfortable couches and learning together what Would Happen or that we’d get so fucked we’d wanna torture each other forever but silently agree to hold off so Colin could kiss a girl in a hotdog costume on New Years Eve and ***** would say that we should bring the remote to bowling and we’d never all date at once, everything would start and end conducive to the first and the last (lucky if you’re the in-between, the rule is Not To Get Stuck On Either End)— it’s the balance of the Universe and then poof it would all be gone but still right in front of my face, mocking me but maybe better this way, because it is This Way, and all the songs would get stuck in time. I’d hear them a year from then and only be able to think that it’s a year from then and spend the whole set crying my eyes out at how pretty it sounded with strings and how pretty it is and just feel really proud of Prim but also myself. Choking down admiration and upset and regret and totally fineness with how it is and the feeling in my body that only just came back. I’m not sure if any of it was really that good because it made me go so bad and off the planet, but I’m also perfectly sure that it was that good. It is always that good. I just never meant to sit down for that long.

I couldn’t stop crying. Whenever I cry in public, Constance’s voice in my head goes I Am Proud Of My Tears because she always used to say that. I went up to Prim after the set and was still crying and we hugged and they just couldn’t Get that their music had Done that to me. (We can’t Get It most of the time. I don’t know if I would’ve cried so hard, either, if they would’ve gotten it.) I keep thinking that the guy who likes me might be better off with a Normal Girl (nobody’s normal, I know) who isn’t gonna try to turn everything funny or say she’s thinking inside of the painting in the wall and not because she’s looking at it as she thinks but using it as a means to get from one place to another. And I probably only say that because maybe I want someone who is going to Think Inside The Painting too, but then, what if that would be the worst thing for me?

I talk about relationships a lot because I talk about people a lot because I think about people a lot and then I think about how I think about people a lot so I think about myself a lot too but more in terms of what I think about other people than what I think of myself but that is myself if I really think about it and then I think about that and try to think of myself separately and recenter my world but as soon as I try to consider the world I remember that the world is other people and then I normally give up and just continue to do it. To think that way. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the way I think about how I sometimes talk about my relationships, my first one specifically, and call it My First Relationship. I think it’s because at this point, he doesn’t feel apart of the equation. It feels more about me than it feels about him even though it has as much to do with him as it ever did because every person we talk to Changes Us A Little Bit— even the girl working at the coffee shop who made a joke to some guy who I could tell she was way cooler than and the joke didn’t land, but then right after he paid, I paid, and I was all like Just So You Know, I Got Your Joke. Absorbed— right into each other. You can’t ever un-hear something. I also keep thinking about when Colin was drunk in the back of my car on his birthday and asked if I thought we’d ever tell each other I Love You again and he was really joking around and then it got serious because I really considered it and I couldn’t say no because I don’t think it’d be possible for me to not feel it if I felt it once and it took me a few minutes to really answer it right, Colin was giggling in that decomposed way but I was thinking hard because I couldn’t say what I didn’t mean because I’ve meant most of the things that have ever happened to me in my life— and I knew before I even considered it that I couldn’t deny that love is it’s what I meant by all of this. When he said Hey Guys to me and Sameera at the show and then I ended it right there, or when I was crying but I stood up and looked right at him in the face and saw him as he saw me, and it felt like a river gushing up against a wall and gathering right before the tallest point and then all at once it drops (I really mean that), or when I had checked the room he was in, looking for someone else, found who I was looking for— for a second until I swiveled back and acted like he wasn’t in there, I couldn’t find him, and he must’ve been upstairs playing a set or outside smoking a cigarette or at the bar waiting for his drink,

but to answer the question I had to reason that (I’ll just say it) I Do Still Love Him, But I Also Hate Him, and to that Colin said You Can’t Really Hate Someone Without Loving Them and again, we all agreed.

It’s also not really that serious. I don’t wanna say it when as soon as I say it, it’ll change— because that’s what happens when you say something. But that’s also why I’m saying it. Being silent is stupid.