BARRIERS (cont...)
“That’s a pretty drawing,” Grandma said. She was babysitting me and my brothers that night.
“Her name’s Laura. She’s a movie star,” I happily told her, in my squeaky seven-year-old voice. Little did she know that this beautiful person was secretly me.
I always had these mini fantasies when I was young. My neighbor Emily and I would sit in her room, dressed in our mothers’ old high school dresses and heels. Her crush of the moment was Nick Carter, that Backstreet Boy. Mine was always fictionalized. Made up with some name I thought I liked. I think it was Jason in third grade. We would concoct adventures where our men would rescue us and kiss us under the darkness of her bed at the end.
On nights I couldn’t sleep, I’d re-enact my own stories in my head. I wanted this. My love would help me rescue some people or we’d escape some major tragedy and he’d passionately kiss me, cradling me. I had seen clips on TV when Mom wasn’t looking. But who would really want me? No boys at school ever expressed interest. They had laughed at me, called me ugly, moved away when the teacher made them stand in line next to me. My imaginary boys loved me because I would always be this glamorous, perfect person. I was different in my stories. I was blonde with blue eyes. I could do anything. They wanted to be with me. I was strong and no man would run away with my love. But that’s what I really was afraid of. By letting Paul in with a simple kiss, I was giving him the chance to hurt me.
I let Paul kiss me that night, and many times after. But I wasn’t comfortable. I never really reached for him. And when I told him it was over two months later, I felt little remorse as I never connected to him. I never hated him. I was afraid of him. I didn’t want to let it go any further because he might actually begin figuring me out. He might learn my secrets. And then he’d see I had nothing exciting to offer him. He’d leave me. I made excuses. His nickname of “Addie-bu” was quickly gaining mocking remarks from friends and family. I crinkled my nose at it every time to show mock displeasure, even though I loved what it meant to both of us. So I left him before I could fall in love. I didn’t know I had already fallen.
What I quickly forgot once we closed up our lake house for the summer, was that Paul had been my escape. He let me run from the complications that waited for me back home. He made me feel special, beautiful. I didn’t have to pretend and live through my made-up stories. He thrilled me every time he kissed me under the flickering spotlight behind my garage. Mosquitoes buzzing in my ear alongside the shuffling footsteps of my sleepy father as he hurried to the screen door to spy.
That next year, all it took was one crooked smile and a rude comment about how I looked pale and I wanted him back those first few days of summer. We weren’t the same people anymore. I had taken that innocence and smashed it with my dumb excuses, ignoring him all winter when he tried reaching out to me through a brave phone call. I would hastily click the “ignore” button or answer just to be cold, unapproachable. I thought I had grown in those few months with him. He had given me that first push toward some confidence, but it was a false confidence. I melted with the snow and ice.
It worked for maybe three months longer than the first shot. Megan, my Otis friend since we were toddlers, had heard some interesting rumors from the boys.
“Did you hear what Paul said to the boys?” she asked me, carefully painting a line of red nail polish on her big toe.
“No,” I warily replied.
“He told them he’s just getting back at you, using you,” she said. “He’ll leave you by the end of summer after he gets what he wants.”
She looked up at me, searching my face for a reaction. I got up and walked out to the deck, letting the lake wind pick my hair up and I shut my eyes. This was a joke. He didn’t want me back because he still had feelings for me. This was revenge. I thought of how he had held me in the boat the previous night, holding me like a precious china doll and asking continually if I was ok. My lips were soft from his continually pressing to mine. I remember nodding and hugging him closer to me, finally attaining that closeness I had thought I wanted. It had been an act. He wanted to hurt me like I had hurt him.
I brusquely walked inside, rushed past Megan, and shoved my still wet polished toe nails into my running shoes and ran down the driveway and into the dusty lake drives. I heard the beep as Paul’s boat pulled up to my dock. My stride slowed. I heard Megan yell “hey boys” and then run down to the boat. They waited. I turned around and went down to the dock and ripped my shoes off.
“Hey babe,” he said, hooking an arm around my waist and pulling me into the boat. He put me on his lap and played with my hair as the music blasted and we cruised down the main drag of the lake. We were the kids of summer. He had just been acting tough, I told myself.
I never stopped running, physically. It had gotten me things I thought I wanted. I was known by pretty much every single person in my high school, as well as people familiar with the state cross-country circuit. I gained confidence. Running was where I could zone out for an hour and a half. People walking would make joking comments like, “There’s a speed limit here!” or “How many miles today?” One guy told me I would be a great marathoner one day. My favorite was when they asked me my mile pace and I could proudly say I run a seven minute mile for ten plus miles. The impressed look I received would be enough to fuel me for another five miles at least. I felt some importance in my running. I felt like I had finally gained a presence. Not to mention, I saw a change in my body. I saw myself as a more attractive athlete.
I pulled Paul into the running world. He joined the team at his school to try and impress me after we broke up for the first time. In the end, he found friends through it. He thanks me to this day for getting him involved. I still laugh at him because he would join me on runs in the summer and walk up the hills.
“There’s something wrong with you,” he would wheeze as we climbed the hill.
I just laughed easily, my summer training making the hill seem like a speed bump.
He tackled me onto the side of the road, ignoring the fact we were both sweating profusely. He kissed me as it started to rain.
“Nice try. You still have to run up this hill,” I said, un-sticking myself from his saturated body.
“Don’t be such a hard ass,” he said, taking off in a sprint up the last 50 meters of the hill.
I shook my head and ran after him. This time, I was chasing him.
Daphne was considered Apollo’s first love. Who has trouble remembering their first love? Their first kiss? Mine was perfect. Under a full moon, lying on the bench seat of my ski boat. I could see every star and hear every breaking twig. It was as clichéd as the movies make it. Paul likes clichés. But what I remember most is finally feeling something. I always thought back on it and was embarrassed.
The Kindergarten situation made me embarrassed. As I got older, I grew more and more self conscious. I was timid. I knew that there was some important connection to what had happened and that it was wrong. Later, in eighth grade, my looks made me feel worthless. I felt that since I was already crowned ugliest girl in class I might as well stop trying. Even Megan made me feel inferior in Otis. Her skin always bronzed in the sun. Mine did not. She had confidence as she ran about in just her bikinis. I covered up. I used running as a distraction. I threw myself into it because that would get me what I wanted. I thought it would give me confidence. That did not just happen. Somehow, Paul got me to trust him. He went slow. But he was persistent. I told him I was scared. Told him I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. He put a finger to my lips and told me to relax, everything was alright. I left Kindergarten behind. I left grammar school behind. I started growing up, slowing down while still moving forward.
My mother is very proper. Anything sexual is a taboo in our house. I used to punch my brother’s crotch during bath time when we were little and my mother put me in time-out on the cold, gray toilet seat. She told me punching Mike’s “private parts” was not lady-like.
She has a predetermined view of who I should be dating. Paul wasn’t a Catholic boy. He swore. He was rude. He was arrogant. She had a laundry list. She’s only looking out for me. Yet, I’m on my own, feeling my way through this life with my feet going first. She says she never wants to control who I date, but I still find it difficult to talk to her about him. I’m nervous even bringing him up sometimes, my stomach doing flip flops and my face grows hot. Never in a million years could I tell her about Kindergarten. I figured everything I did was wrong.
“What’s wrong?” Paul asked. I hadn’t realized I was shivering in his arms.
“Nothing,” I replied, looking up at the moon as he pulled the tartan blanket tighter around us.
“Love you,” he said, with a kiss.
I think back to that first kiss. I was scared in that moment. Scared of giving myself away. But no matter what, I would give anything to go back to that very moment. Daphne’s first and only love was in the forest around her. She scorned the idea of marriage and love towards a man. Apollo ignored this, implored her to look at him differently, “Stay. I am not a foe. Do not fly me as a lamb flies the wolf, or a dove the hawk. It is for love I pursue you. You make me miserable, for fear you should fall and hurt yourself on these stones and I should be the cause.” She ignores him and is turned into a laurel tree. Apollo fashions his wreath of victory from her branches, still admiring her every trait.
Daphne, however, was smart. She is someone I hate and admire. She knew that she would hold Apollo’s affections for only a short time. There would be no happily ever after. So she ran away. I ran away too. Well, I tried to at first. I was afraid of that same lack of permanence. My whole life had been filled with instabilities. Paul was like any boy. There would be prettier girls who did more exciting things. But what if Daphne had loved him back? What if Apollo really wanted to be with just her, forever? Wouldn’t she maybe want to give him a chance? I had started loving Paul back. At this point, he would hurt me if he left no matter what.
We spent one entire summer fighting. I let my brother and his friend put whipped cream all over the inside of his car. They even left him a signed note amidst the dripping dairy condiment. They signed it “Mike and DJ, the dudes you wish you could be” and “Addie, the girl you’ll never have”. Paul blamed me for the entire thing. We made up right before I left for college. He apologized for calling me some pretty awful names. I apologized for aiding in the defilement of his Subaru. Then we slowly managed to stitch our relationship back together. There were a few bumps, but nothing major until he left for school a year later, during the fall of my sophomore year of college.
Distance is hard for any couple. I let my imagination run away with me. I let overconfident “boy-talk” determine what I believed and why. I imagined wild parties. I imagined a girl I could never equal. Does he tell her she’s beautiful, too? Does he run his hands all over her body, his eyes glazed soft under their drunken haze? Probably. I know it. He closed his eyes and kissed her. Hard. I see her clutching at his shirt before she throws it on the floor. I think, for a moment, of Kindergarten. How she kissed him, this perverse look of curiosity on both of their faces. Their blue eyes sharp and staring from beneath lowered eyelashes. I can see him help her shimmy her too-tight shorts down. I shut my eyes tight and feel like I’m outside the door listening. I feel dirty with these thoughts. Unattractive. Abused. Wasted. Foolish. My insecurities eat at me from the inside. Our past flaws galvanize these thoughts.
I think what hurt the most was that feeling that he wasn’t thinking about me, missing me, like I missed him. Exteriors hide turmoil. Paul and I look “adorable” at first glance, holding hands or him twirling one of my stray curls between his fingers. Rodin’s statue was an original piece of an even larger project for The Gates of Hell which was based off Dante’s Divine Comedy. The background of the two lovers, Francesca and Paolo, states that they were the two members of an affair. Francesca was actually promised in marriage to Paolo’s older brother. He was sent to her with a message one day and the two fell in love, continuing to see each other in secret even after the marriage. Both cheating on their significant other. An onlooker to the statue wouldn’t know this without being told or reading it beforehand. They simply look completely enthralled by the wonders of passionate desire. But there’s always that back story.
Paul and I have our faults. I pushed him away, telling him that he was too immature or we couldn’t handle the distance. Now, I hold him too tight. He refuses to use a telephone to call at night. How long does it take to answer a two word text message? Not long. Our fights seem superficial later on. We both have flaws and they magnified when we pushed ourselves together.
Rachel sees my relationship with Paul better than anyone. When I first introduced them the second year that Paul and I were dating, he could not remember her name. He called her Sarah. Rachel wrinkled her nose in disdain. She has no qualms about making her displeasure known. She sarcastically called him “Eli.”
“Well, if you can’t get my name right, I can’t get yours right, ‘babe’,” she said, raising an eyebrow at his confused face.
She’s seen us through it all. She was the friend that turned down a jetski ride with a wink because she wanted me to go spend some time alone in Dismal Bay. She pulled out an old notebook and settled down on the dock, her bug-eye sunglasses lower on her face so she could watch us drive away over the top of them. She’s always been there. She’s brutally honest with me at all times, but she’s there. I distinctly recall her walking down a dark dorm hallway, mascara most likely smudged from the previous night, yelling into her phone, “Do you want me to come up there and kick his ass?” She gave me the poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in my freshman year of college, when I was struggling with having her being so far away at Florida State.
Rachel admits that as a best friend, it’s her duty to not like the boyfriend. But she knows Otis. “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.” This is Otis. This is Paul. I’ve run and run and run. I’ve come back to this spot where it started and stopped. Otis. Innisfree, an island on Lough Lake in Ireland, is off on its own. Away from the crazy scramble of the rest of the world. It’s about a place where a person can just exist. Yeats’s poem comes from spending his childhood at this lake. Otis has been my childhood, my adolescence and my present.
I went to Otis a few weeks ago. The snow still shimmered on the ground and the lake was still lying dormant under its heavy coat of ice. I got out of my old Buick and looked to the doorway of 77 Lakeview Lane. There he was. Smiling his crooked grin, flop of hair reaching over his blue eyes. He swings me up into his arms and hugs me tight to his body.
“How’s my beautiful Bella? I missed you,” he says.
We are just two people existing, in our surroundings and in each other. Paolo and Francesca. We have a back story, but it is simply that. It no longer defines who we are other than our hurdling the barriers. I wish to be stone, frozen in time.
My car breaks down and he drives me back to school. I cry the next morning when he goes to leave, knowing a long month stands between me and his next visit. While I was in class, he had covered my room in hidden Post-It notes. I finally found the last one.
“I love you, babe. You are going to have a great day!”
I smile and cry more because he’s not there.
So what exactly do I run from? I ran from anything that I thought would hurt me. I took no risks until I met Paul. Our relationship is the curse of a first love. That memory of being those two awkward teenagers, hurting each other and growing up together makes it difficult to run away. We’ve hurt each other and we’ve healed. Daphne ran. The smarter thing to do. She ran and allowed herself to be turned into a laurel tree, escaping the possibility of any connections being made. Apollo still kept that little piece of her for himself, his love frozen in the admired action of victory. Rodin’s statue is really about an affair. Francesca and Paolo are perfect, frozen in time, hiding their tragedy. There is something permanent in each story. Paul and I can disintegrate, but I’m not afraid of the hurt. I’ll always have a piece for myself.
Running has worn itself out. It’s like a job now. My feet always ache, my knees crackle as I climb the stairs. Paul hates how much I run because he thinks I’m slowly killing myself. Maybe I am. A partially torn Achilles, micro tears in my hamstrings, a stress fracture on my fibula; the list is miles long. These injuries make me hate the sport. There’s no carefree joy in it anymore. There are just dollar signs for an education I’m not sure I ever wanted. I’ve come to the point where I’ve stopped running away. I’m not scared anymore. Forget the back story. I think Rodin’s statue is about love and desire in its simplest of natures. I think Daphne should have given Apollo a chance. I waited for Paul. I waited for him to fuck up. I waited for him to grow up. All because he waited for me. It’s time to start living life at something other than race pace. I don’t want to hit the finish line too soon.
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