The smell of grease and pizza enveloped my senses as I tugged on the bright red apron and tied it behind my back. It was the first day of my first job. I circled around to the back of the counter to learn pizza-making and burger flipping from the attractive guy behind the counter. We’d met in passing. He introduced himself and showed me how to work the kitchen, tugging on latex gloves and working through a variety of meats, cheeses, and varied toppings. His friendly manner captivated me. Over the next few days, I learned the intricacies of food service and my crush grew. At the end of the week, he kissed me.
He immediately dumped his girlfriend. As an incredibly insecure 17-year-old whose self-worth was the size of a dime I was elated. The guy I had a crush on saw something of merit in me! I absolutely adored this mysterious older guy, but the relationship progressed quicker than I was ready for. We had sex after a few weeks. I didn’t want to, but whether it was my conditioning to keep my feelings to myself or my utter fear of rejection, went along with it anyway. My virtue was gone. Afterwards I felt so strange, bound to this person I barely knew and yet disconnected from myself. The world hardly made sense.
There was backlash afterwards from some who cared, those who didn’t approve and others who I now understand were obsessive and abusive. It quickly transformed into feeling difficult. We began drinking together, throwing parties with a strange mix of teens and adults. He began to encourage me to become more sexually liberal and led me to his bedroom with another guy, then left us alone. My soul felt dark and lost, drowning in an endless sea.
I made a human friend–his twin brother, and an ethereal friend–weed. Somehow it kept me connected enough to myself to feel okay. His brother was goofy and relaxed and somehow made me feel safe in a world that felt strange and threatening on all sides. Some cold winter night, when the mist dampened all sound, cocaine snuck its way into my world through dim lamplight and rolled dollar bill. How far would I go to feel alive again? The pain was paralleled only by the perceived threat of loss. The fear of losing the closest thing to human affection that I had ever felt paralyzed me.
I fell into despair over and over, only to lift myself up with chemicals and momentary escape. Sometimes I didn’t know why I got back up. After the coke our discord became more apparent; we broke up, would do our own thing, then feel pulled back together by forces beyond us. The love was sickly and dependent, two damaged souls looking for respite and escape together. Neither of us knew any better. Other people became tangled in our periphery as the charade dragged on.
Spring ached, even as the seasons promised a renewal of life. Somehow I maintained steady A’s in school as I struggled to stay present in my own mind. The warm weather saw yet another chemical ooze itself into my feeble domain as crystals of white powder burned and bubbled in glass. Our pattern of breaking up for a few weeks, doing drugs and running around with our new, separate friends, and coming back together continued with a new dose of secrets and sour lies mixed into the pot.
Some night toward the end of my senior year, as my mom came to pick me up, his ex drove by in his car. It was too much, it broke me; I rushed to confront him and locked myself in a room. As he began to kick the door in, a mirror shattered. Without hesitation I lifted a shard to my wrist and pressed it in as deep as I could. He carried me outside and ferried me home, to my domestic prison cell. As he, my mom, and I sat on the bed of a pickup truck, removed from the town and all the people that stung my sensibilities, they finally unloaded a painful secret: they had agreed that he would pretend to love me until I graduated. My mom mistakenly feared that I would drop everything to stay in the place that I had dreamt of and worked so hard to leave. She begged him to help me get out, and get to college, by lying to me for the sake of my future.
Awash with various hues of emotion, ranging from lividity to agony, I slapped her. She hit me back and called the cops. I spent the night in a cold cell with a kind older woman whose alcoholism had earned her a residency in the local jailhouse. She had a TV. We watched the twilight zone all night as I quietly sobbed for myself, my illusions retreating to die. The next day I went home under orders of therapy. The most mortifying thing in all of it was that nothing on earth or in heaven could have kept me from leaving, certainly not some boy who I had grown to hate as much as I loved. No one asked or took me into consideration. Many questions remained unanswered and my ability to trust was gone. I was ready to leave the small, dingy town that had clipped my wings and smothered my soul.
The courage to let go finally found its way into my heart. Functioning separately and unencumbered by the weight of the relationship, I began to feel lighter. I could breathe again. The myriad of chemicals that danced through my life over the past year disappeared as quickly and easily as they had come. He and I settled into a friendship as I turned 18 and moved into the city. We spent time together but it wasn’t heavy and burdensome like before, and mostly we did our own thing. Sometimes the only way to break a pattern is to see the man behind the curtain and realize how silly you’ve been for participating in the entire charade.