Love, Lose, And Repeat

Diary of an Unstable Teen Terror

Mom bangs on my bedroom door more and more, asking idiot questions like, who was that you've been walking home with? and it better not be Adrian again, because Mrs. Myers, down the street, saw you walking with--I don't give a fuck who sees me. So, I tell mom that and then--there it is, her not wanting to hear it, and threatening the safety of my stereo and my social life.

Adrian's probably driving his bike by the house. I hear wheels with rubber grinding over sidewalk cement. He is out there, with his cig, wondering where I went. Well, I'm hiding behind the broken shades of my room. The light fights through and a strand of sun hits my white wall.

Then mother's back again, with her new sense of calm, asking why Adrian's out there, why he doesn't have something better to do on a Friday afternoon, and why there are ashes on her prize-winning roses. They spread just to the pair of red ones on the left, eager access to sun, supple and soft, the ones that always win her ribbons.

Adrian doesn't care, he will take the roses, the view of my widow, and the sidewalk cement. He takes the time I set aside and the money I save to buy grass on the sly. He has to impress his metal-head broski's that don't know their knobs from their knees. As mom keeps reminding me: there are better boys out there--well mother, where? We pair up in school like we are about to board Noah's unsinkable arc. Two lions, lovers in the hall, always licking each other on my locker and I am just left standing there because I live without a prescribed pairing.

How does someone look down at this world and decide who gets love and who doesn't? Did I do something so putrid in an past life that I deserve Adrian--fucking Adrian Ainsworth--whose version of "I love you" is belching the letters after crushing a can of coke against his junk. Adrian, whose version of "intimacy" is taking Toni Goldrich to prom and leaving me at home in my full, fluffy, pink, prom cliche and waiting for his bike to show up at my door. I told my mom I went to prom, I told my friends I stayed home, I told the ticket vendor, I'll take one for whatever the fuck is playing this late.

Mom wants to know why we were walking together, she keeps asking and asking. Why I let him take everything then leave me behind. Because I like to give, I'm a giver, and if Adrian asks for some gum or to come over his house and spend an hour studying Chem and an hour studying the curves of his body. Who am I to say no? I don't look down at the world and choose who gets to have love, someone else does. I take the love I am given, who cares who it's from, it's just a feeling--a feeling I can find in anyone.