He spoke a language I never understood. He talked of time travel and ribs cracking and the 8th wonder of the world. He once tried to explain to me, sitting at Starbucks in a new town how the theory of aliens was so plausible it made his head spin.
I caught a glimpse of his mind on a dreary, storm ridden night when he exercised his future plans and hypnotized me into a trance and asked me a series of questions pertaining to death. I felt my body tremble with white, pulsating, shimmery light and I became hysterical. I cried firstly, and then began to laugh. My whole being shook with emotion.
That was the first time I'd ever felt like I was connected to someone—there was no I—just us, combined souls in one human creature that gods had once had their clawed and feathered hands on; and that was the first time I'd ever had sex. I felt a man inside of me that night and it hurt, it hurt as bad as when I got my first tattoo, except this was on the inside and it was like cramping but I loved it and I loved him.
We were so in sync that I can hardly fathom the life I would've lived if I'd never met him. If I'd never spotted him at my best friend's graduation party and if I'd never grown my hair out and if I'd never worn it in such a loose bun that my bangs fell out and if he'd never tucked them back into place and if I'd never kissed him in that moment... I don't want to think about the "if"s anymore because they're irrelevant now. That's what he did to me. He never changed me but he allowed me the room for me to change me. Then he gave me a black Sharpie and let me write my flaws on cigarettes and we smoked them together in my dad's truck, because I knew that it'd be okay somehow.
He spoke a language I never understood. He talked of eyes gushing and peeling an orange to reveal the innards of a tomato and imploding stars. He told me to never try and understand him but instead to focus on myself because there was no understanding the existence of a fly.
Let's start from the very beginning, though. My name is Anais Rex Thompson, a spur of the moment decision lead my mom to pick a name that would make my life as a female child a living hell. In elementary school, the kids dubbed me T-Rex and I thought that was so mean that I'd go home every day crying about how I wanted a girl name. My mom got sick of feeling guilty and tried to have my name changed to Anais May Thompson. That didn't happen for a variety of reasons along the lines of laziness.
By middle school, T-Rex was forgotten and I made actual, possibly cleverer friends. I guess I was too boring to be king of the dinosaurs since my friends started to call me Ana Rex, the irreplaceably replaceable. It sounds rude but who has real friends who don't bully and torture each other at that age?
Freshman year was okay, better than middle school but worse than the rest of high school. I lost six people in my life that year—friends, family— and I was so alone that every day during first lunch I would leave class and wander around town, praying subconsciously that my mom would find me and maybe she'd care that I wasn't at school and somehow realize that I was too alone. I never got caught.
When I became a sophomore I met my best friend. Spencer was like the summer wrapped in ribbon and rolling papers. She loved me immediately and that made me ecstatic. Before that I didn't understand love at first sight but it's real and Spencer grew on me to the point that she had two drawers in my dresser in my room. She wanted to move in once until we figured out that we basically lived together already and we were both too lazy to clean out her room and move stuff into mine. Every day we laughed and watched reality shows and ate too much and too little and every night we complained about our dads and our homework that we ended up never doing.
Junior year was when I started living and I smoked weed and drank and I went to parties every night regardless of school and I snorted coke in Los Angeles with my childhood friend and her brother who I'd had a crush on forever. Spencer came with me and they started dating and we all took my friend's grandmother's Oxycodone secretly the night before spring break ended. That same year I found Spencer OD'ing in a bathtub at a party with her boyfriend nowhere in sight and I drove her to the hospital without my license.
