How to Love Claire Mason

Assumptions

Snap, crack, boom, pop, thud, crash, crunch. The tinkling, high-pitched, almost pretty sound of a window shattering. The clattering of a picture frame crashing to the floor. The tearing of a lovely dress, or perhaps a tapestry. The smashing sound of a glass bottle thrown at a door in anger.

How does heartbreak sound?

You must have read those sentences reluctantly, under the impression that they were the beginnings of another long, angsty poem penned by a dark, clinically depressed teenager with pills by her bedside she refuses to take, an overbearing, graying mother who only wants her daughter to have friends and joy in her life, and of course, because the "poem" seems to be about love, a long string of ex-boyfriends with hands and eyes that wandered and eyes and lips and hips that lied. Wait, not hips. Forget that part. That's from a song or something.

Now I'm sure you read that paragraph, criticized that obnoxiously, criminally long run-on sentence and thought, once again, yep, I'm reading the works of a angsty teen girl. She is so grammatically incorrect, you think, because in her anger and depression she ignores her English teacher, even cuts class sometimes. That's what you think. We all make assumptions.

Yet, to me, the worst assumption of all is the one I just made about you. The assumption of what you think. And, along with that, the assumption, the belief, that what you think of me matters. Because it doesn't. I mean, it shouldn't. You're a stranger, one that just happened to be lucky (or unlucky?) enough to find these papers I so unceremoniously dropped onto this bus stop bench.

But the thing is, when you spend three years of your life basing your worth on how thin and pretty you are and how thin and pretty everyone thinks you are, what strangers, and what everyone for that matter, thinks, matters. And because you never know, no one tells you, really, exactly how they think and feel about you, the constant guessing and wondering eats away at you and you start to assume and assume and assume what they think and you start to believe your assumptions and believing them hurts and the not knowing just tears you apart inside.

You must think I'm shallow, so, so shallow. That's okay. That's what my parents think. It's what everyone thinks.

That girl, Claire, she was anorexic once. She's so self-centered, so stupid. Such an attention whore.

I can almost hear everyone's thoughts about me. There I go assuming again.

To assume is to make an ass out of you and me. That's what I've always been told.

So I guess, I just made an ass out of you, a total stranger. Sorry about that. I hope you understand I'm only trying to clear my head. The words running through my mind had become stacked up too high like Jenga pieces and no one had been kind enough to carefully take a word out. I said one word, two words, and then everything fell apart and tumbled out with nowhere to go. There was paper, and a pen nearby, thank God. These words, these pieces, they needed a soft landing to save them. To save me.

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