An Unnamed Blog

Day 3: 12:00 pm

This is bad. This is all very, very bad. I saw Katie today. She stopped by as I was helping my professor set up his table. We had an Art show to go to this weekend.

A little backstory: Katie is a struggling artist, just as I am a struggling researcher. Except she knows what subjects to devote herself too. She is also apparently good at what she does, but I also confess, under the full blanket safety of anonymity that I don't get her work at all. And there are few things that I hate more than going to her art shows. The first fifteen times were sort of fun. She always looks so happy when she gets to interact with people who are touched by her art. But three months of shows every other weekend?

Shows that I have to attend because this is her life and the way her face dropped when I told her I didn't want to go is still seared in my memory. I know I could just tell her that I don't want to go but weekends are the only times I'm really free from school work. Times that I want to spend with her and time that I also desperately want to spend by myself doing nothing.

Today I did it. I told her that I didn't want to go to her show. And her face dropped, like before. But you know the worst part? My heart didn't. It twinged. A twinge that was quickly smothered under an overwhelming sense of relief.

The same kind of relief I felt whenever Archie canceled plans on me. The same kind of relief that only exists when resentment is close by.

My parents have a great relationship. I think that's why I am so messed up. They are two people who get each other. They exist better as a single entity.

And that's the goal isn't it? That's how you know you've made it. You have someone who completes you, someone to share your life with. A yin to a yang. An extrovert to an introvert. A Bucky to a Steve Rogers.

I wonder if they ever deal with this resentment. How they overcome it. How they know it's worth overcoming it.

Katie and I met my first day of college. I was single for the first time in years. I felt vulnerable and naked. Lonely.

Then I met her and I had my moment.

Do you know that moment that puts it all in perspective? That makes it all click into place and makes you go oh.

I didn't just admire her. I didn't just  want to be her. It was a girl crush.

My moment was Katie. She was handing out flyers for a house party her friends were hosting. They were a newly formed band and were going to be playing there tonight.

"Hi! You seem like someone who could use a good time."

That's how it all started, and it was enough for me to grab onto. She was so happy and alive and colorful. Bright and full of life during a time where I had never felt more empty and dull. She breathed life into me. Everyone talks about how exciting it is to be young, to have opportunities, a clear calm ocean to set sail on. But they never talk about how terrifying it can be to have an open road and no plan. No navigator or co-pilot, someone to keep you awake during the long drives.

I had panic attacks all throughout freshmen year. I would spiral and all the ways I could mess everything up would just hit me. It's not like that was out of character for me. I liked to ruin things that were going well for me for no reason. Things like Archie and me.

I told all my fears to Katie. She had become my dearest friend. We spent the nights talking, sitting outside on the concrete wall in front of my dorm, sipping cheap alcohol straight and burying our hands in the pockets of our hoodies. She never interrupted me as I told her things. She let them spill out of me, never once trying to shove them back in. When I was really done, sometime in late December that first semester, she hugged me, her warmth and scent enveloping me. She told me that it was all right to feel afraid, but that I needed to remember to breathe. That was the only way I was ever going to get through things.

The next day after class she took me to a tattoo parlor. And I clutched her paint stained fingers in mine as I got a tattoo on my side, right by my left lung.

Breathe

I didn't know how afraid I had been to take that first step outside the rule box I had been assigned at birth until I lifted my shirt and looked in the mirror at the finished tattoo. Something in me released and for the first time in a long time, I smiled as bright as Katie.

And I kissed her then.

Not because of the adrenaline, not to prove something to the world but because she had given me a gift. And in that moment I had felt whole again. This was my navigator, my person, my way of never feeling lonely again.

What kind of person loses sight of that in three years?

--Signed

This kind of person.