“There is always one person who you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable… The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.” - Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (2005)
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They say that talking about things takes a lot of weight off your shoulders. Which is why I know that you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. You talked all the time, vivacious words that structured incandescent sentences. Sentences I tried to commit to memory because I knew they were irretrievably lost if I forgot them because no one else would be able to reconstruct them. You were an engineer of words. Yet you never talked about the turmoil going on inside your head. The “I’m fine”’s were all deceptions and you bore the weight of a thousand sorrows better than Atlas bore the skies on his shoulders. Never once did I see you hand over the weight to Hercules, even for a moment.
As I look at you now and see the eyes so captivated with the world I wonder if I have wrongly fallen in love and wrongly turned the unrequited love into requited love. For surely someone as indefinable as you deserves to be defined by their experiences with more than just one person at their side. Though perhaps you will never be defined and you will remain with frayed edges and loose threads, too short to be pulled and too long to pass unnoticed completely.
“The world is so conceited that it tries to turn everyone living there into a mirror so it will always be able to see itself. And instead of fighting back society has become large walls of mirrors that have created infinite reflections. We are the cracks that appear in the mirrors and shatter them. We are the ones who will break down the wall and burn the foundations on which it was built.” You said that to me once and it was one of your sentences structured so subtly that it almost went over my head. Except I could feel the threat in it and the intimacy with which you knew society even though society had little clue of what brilliance formed your atoms. “We are the people our parents warned us about and we are the people who will sneak in the night and tear down the bars of plight. We are the people who society has cast out and we are the people who will soar in the day and release those with flight.” I didn’t know how much impact your words would have or how on earth you could look so nonchalant as you smoked your cigarette and spoke of destruction with reverence and fragility burning your tone.
You did though and as you leant against the wall, the cuffs of your jumper covering your hands, your eyes searched mine. You weren’t lost though and you had already found what you were looking for, you were just trying to see if there was something more. Something that would make me a person our parents had warned us about. I knew the ‘we’ wasn’t you and I for when you spoke those haunted words to me we had known each other for only two months, and I had not yet become the person I am now; the person who would stand on top of the ashes of the world and smile, lighter in hand. The ‘we’ were the people who you saw in record stores and book stores and pointed out to me; nails bitten down, hair slightly disheveled, lost in their worlds, boots scuffing the floor, clothes outlining their shape too much or not at all, wrists speckled with bracelets, faces marred with ingenuity.
These were the people who were the cracks in the mirrors and would soon shatter. They were the ones who stood out from the crowd and took a stand. Except you hadn’t seem to notice that whilst standing up and away you had all formed your own wall of mirrors that reflected each other. I wasn’t going to point this out now and I don’t think I even realized it then, at a time when I was still following in your footsteps and not making my own path. Now we walk side by side and not in front and behind. Now you can relish in the thought of knowing me as much as I have always reveled in the thought of knowing you. Because now I have shattered and my shards are forming fires. All thanks to you and that grin your lips elope into whenever you’re about to do something brilliant.
“Do you like it?”
“What?” We stood inside the record store on 44th and you were holding out a sleeve to me, weighed down with the vinyl that was inside.
“This song,” you sounded a bit irritated but it was vague and so I pushed it to the back of my mind.
“Yeah. I mean, it’s alright.” The sleeve bore the words Whole Lotta Love. It was one of Led Zeppelin’s songs.
“Alright?” And then you sounded incredulous - but an excited sound of incredulous. You knew that I was about to wake up to a whole new world of music and you were so blithely excited to be the one to wake me up. “Have you actually heard it?”
“Well… no, bu-“
“No buts, you’re listening to it.” You were grinning, excited for me. Almost as if it was going to be your first time listening to an amazing song too. You smiled and then turned to the nearest record player, settling the vinyl down and then putting the needle on. A few moments of static and then… music. The steady pump of the bass line seemed to reverberate through my body as the words seeped from the record player, lyrics forming into reasons to live. That was the reaction you had wanted and you got it. It wasn’t even the beginning.
You’d introduced me to something that would change my life. I didn’t know though and I didn’t until my life had changed. It happened after you introduced yourself; after you became the girl all others would be compared to.
YOU ARE READING
youth
Teen FictionOur memories do not always serve us correctly. But they do serve us kindly.
