SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

Day 2 Monday, November 20, 2017

My family always had an early thanksgiving with people from the local religious churches. My father was such a con artist that he made it a major marketing scheme to attend the local Islamic mosques every Friday, Jewish temples every Saturday morning, and churches every Sunday. He would sit in the front and even pay the local sheiks, rabbis and priests to save him a reserved spot so everyone could see him. You see, my father was an avid fan of Benjamin Franklin, and Ben Franklin used to do the same thing. He would attend all the religious institutions and sit in the front to display himself, remind people he existed. And by the time Benjamin Franklin's funeral came around, the numbers of woeful believers attending his service shot through the roof.

Speaking of funerals, I thought I was about to die soon of embarrassment, because one minute into the meal and my father had already started shooting off questions to Jack about how his father's side businesses were going and how he was enjoying his government position while away to Israel. This was the first meal I had ever invited a boy to, and the whole family seemed to find pleasure in cracking jokes about me in front of him. They made fun of my mannerisms, my one-hour showers, my past crushes on boy singers I will not mention at this moment, and how my big dream to become a ballet dancer flattened out by the age of four when I decided I didn't want to blend in with the rest of the crowd who wore pink. Pink was the performance uniform. I wanted to where rainbow because I was going through a phase where I despised solid colors for some reason...

Turning pink myself, as I tried to hide behind a flower pot at the center of our long family table (my dad's side of the family was with us tonight— we would be going to my mother's parents' house on Thanksgiving in Beverly Hills.)

Throughout my terrible, silent embarrassment however, Jack did something marvelous. He placed his hand on my knee every time a joke about me came up, and he began to run his fingers up my leg. This was a genius strategy to diffuse my focus on their bullying. In fact, my focus fell onto the memory of last night instead. My mind cleared of the present time, and my father's extended family and all the table and chairs disappeared as I was transported back into that hot tub. And then after to my bedroom where Jack and I laid under the sheets together in the dark, watching the moon and the stars through my balcony overlooking the crashing waves of the ocean down the hill. I smelled the seasonal pumpkin spice candle I'd lit for us (nothing was really pumpkin about it ha-ha), and we shared the warmth and the flesh on our bodies together. His hands had minds of their own as they explored the terrain of my skin, and we fell asleep and woke up again several times in the night. Sometimes he would wake up to me kissing him, sometimes I would wake up to him climbing over my mountains. But when the alarm on our phones rang at six a.m., which meant my parents would be landing at the airport not too long from now, we lifted our heads and kissed goodbye. Because it was time for him to go. It was the saddest moment of my life. (Shows you how good my life is, doesn't it?)