Lolly

Age 20

Sprawled on the couch, one leg resting atop another, her hip protruding outwards from her short shorts and oversized band t-shirt. She was leaning on one side on her elbow, reading a magazine, her hair up, short and messy with a smoking cigarette between her fingers. She looked like something straight out of a nineties poster.

It was a year and a half into community college and I was surviving. It was tough. I had to travel to and from campus everyday and still lived with mum in our apartment. I was working a part-time job at a fast food joint close to campus to help pay the bills even though she didn't want me to. I guess she didn't have the energy to stop me and a part of her probably couldn't complain about the extra little bit of income. Between this and college, it was hard to keep up with my studies but I somehow managed to pass through my first year. I was doing a course in accounting. I chose it because I liked math and it was the closest I could probably get to it. But it was boring. I never told that to my mum although she could probably sense it. But I suppose it was good enough. It would have to be good enough. At least for now. I had to make it work. A degree would at least put me in the running to land a decent job. I sometimes dreamt of getting a job and making enough money to go to actual, four-year college and studying to become a math teacher. But it seemed too far away and I couldn't even imagine it. So I kept working hard because that's what I knew had to keep me going.
I made a few friends too. We were a small group of four, two guys and two girls, plus some of their friends. They made college slightly more bearable. Sometimes I think we were friends because we saw each other everyday and beyond that, nothing really held us together. But for that time, they kept me less lonely and kept me laughing through the struggle.

I thought about Lolly more often than I'd like to admit. We never spoke about what happened the day of graduation. We kept going as we usually did. But we no longer had clearly defined roles. We no longer knew each other's expectations from our interactions together, and we were no longer sure about how one felt about the other. And I suppose what happened then, is that we each took a step back. And things between us became strange. Things were no longer easy. Everything was calculated, every word, every step. We were caught up in an unspoken pretence of refusing to let the other know what we felt in fear of rejection, or worse, in fear of change. I stared at her and thought about how much I wanted to go next to her. Sit down next to her. Pick up her hand. Or just lie next to her, her head on my shoulders. But none of this happened. I sat opposite her on a chair. Far away. A good enough distance to mask my feelings. A good enough distance to protect me from whatever it was that kept me at bay.

I had dated two girls since what happened with Lolly that day. But it was nothing serious and fizzled out pretty quickly. The first one was too quiet, I guess, somewhat like me, but shier. The second one broke things off with me because she said she wasn't ready. Of course, it was simply a lame excuse to cover up the real reasons that I still don't know.
At the back of my mind though, what haunted me, was the 'what if' with Lolly. What if we plunged straight into change, taking it by the reigns and seeing where it would lead us? What if we stopped pretending everything was the same when it wasn't? What if I could just be brave, for a few seconds? What if it would pay off?

The summer after graduation, Lolly didn't come over like she used to. We grew apart. But when I started college, I ran into her more than once. She was working in a restaurant. I'd meet her sometimes after work. She eventually moved out from her parents' old apartment. And in with Joe. She never said the words boyfriend to describe him. But it was something along those lines, whatever it was. I didn't think she loved him though. It had happened within the last eight months. She got a job outside the neighbourhood, working as a waitress in a restaurant. She also got someone to split the rent with. There was nothing I could do.

I went over to her apartment a few times but never when Joe was around. The apartment was small, and filled with magazines with pages torn apart and pictures cut out. I asked her why that was. She said it's her new hobby. And I soon found out. I stumbled into her bedroom thinking it was the bathroom and saw stacks of messy bits of cardboard, plastered with different pictures overlapping. They were collages, so many of them, littering the floor and bed. They looked amazing, pictures upon pictures in a thoughtfully haphazard way. I only had a second to glance at them before she shut the door in my face. She was so pissed off. But the next time she came over to my apartment, I handed her a stack of magazines I had picked up on campus. And after some persistence, she had settled down and started cutting out pages and pictures.