Love is Friendship on Fire...

If love is supposed to be a friendship set on fire, then why is it so much harder to have a frienship after being in love? Is it because we're all soggy and covered in the water we used to put out our fire, and secretly we just want to go home and dry off instead of standing there getting water droplets on the floor?

It's kind of awkward. I know I've only been in love once, at least I assume it was love because it was the only time I felt the way I did, and there I was sitting on the sofa looking at him drinking coffee with the muscles in my face becoming numb from the forced smile I have pasted on my lips. We don't have anything to say, and I feel like everytime I make a jump to speak it has something to do with our relationship in some way, and he can't look at me, and I want to scream. WHAT HAPPENED!? Yet, in some sick way, my heart is racing a million miles an hour at the fact that he even showed up and is attempting to put in the effort to be my friend.

Friends are good. I keep assuring myself his being there is great, because now I can gain closure and he can be in this little tiny spot in my life even just for a two hour coffee meeting with friends. That's better than the six months of ignoring each other unless it was to bicker or beg. I texted him, thinking he wouldn't respond because he never does, and yet he says he'll join me for coffee. I spend the next twenty minutes having turret like symptoms as I crane my head around to look out the weindow in five second intervals.

I'm waiting to see him, because I know that I will recognise him a mile away. At least, I think I will. He couldnt have changed that much, right? My friends around me are laughing in that forced awkward kind of way because they worry for my sanity as I bounce up and down and try to determine the right way to place my hands so I look casual. Ah, the intricate nature of a dead relationship! I see him, like I knew I would, wearing his flannel and ripped jeans. He walks in a bouncy, almost feminine way and I can't help but to let out a huge sigh and look wide-eyed at the girl next to me.

He's texting, which I know to either be a defense mechanism or destraction. Maybe he was regretting this, maybe he was afraid, I can't really say. I look away the closer he comes, and pretend to occupy myself with my own phone. He walks in and does this grimace type face, walks straight to the counter and orders. I wonder what he was thinking.

When he comes to sit, he forces himself between two people, one being a stranger and the other our old mutual friend, instead of taking the huge empty space next to me. Like I have the plague or something, but that's fine because I can look at him and hear him and that's better than I've had in the last six months so I honestly don't care where he chose to sit. I'm reminding myself to be cool, because it's not that I intended to trick him into coming as some ex-girlfriend drama or anything but god he's beautiful. I distract myself by saying one quick 'hi' to him and then turning away to carry on a very thin and polite conversation with my other friends.

He doesn't say a word, like he's just waiting for this mistake to end so he can go back to his life. But eventually he warms up, he starts to make jokes and make fun and have conversations. But not with me. He can't even look at me. At some point everyone except him and I are gone and I smile at him and he kind of forces a smile and looks at a spot above my shoulder. Why he can't look at me, I don't know. We all have our defenses. But I talk, in an almost too happy way, about the things he might care about or might not.

I tell him about my sister, she loved him so much that I think it was a bad idea to bring her up because he looked like I had stuck a fork in his arm. I never thought about it from his point of view, but he has to be hurting too. Maybe he functions better, but there was a huge part for me to play in his life just as much as there was for him in mine. We broke each other, to a degree, but I wasn't thinking. When he's around, I felt alive. And not alive because I was fueled by sadness but happy, and anxious, feeling this adrenaline rush because he was there in front of me.

He couldn't once look at me, our eyes only met once or twice by accident and we both looked away. For me it was painful, I know the color of his eyes too well to want to look into them. For him I think it was just awkward. He leaned over and whispered to my friend and showed him a picture of his new girlfriend, thinking I didn't hear so I pretended not to, and it actually didn't hurt. I was glad for him, happy he was happy. That was always the intention for me. I guess seeing him, thinking about being friends at some point, made whatever very visible changes I saw in him seem okay.

People change, as I keep saying, and we both have changed. But when a song came over the radio that was playing in the cafe and I got excited and said "This is my song!" and he smiled sincerely and half whispered "I know!" and hummed along while I sang the words, I realized that what happened is always going to be engraved in our memories. The bits and pieces of each other (like my song or his eye color) will stay with us until god-only knows when, and that makes it real. That makes me feel less crazy. It helped me so much, helped me feel human. And even though I don't believe we will ever be together the way we were in my Once-Upon-A-Time, I am content to say we are working on a reconciliation and friendship.

A friendship that I hope will one day dry itself off from the water used to put out the flames, and blossom into something that is good for both of us.

Time changes

I can't express the importance of saying things out loud. I don't really care if you feel like it needs to be said, sometimes the only way to really get the point across is to use your words. I look back on last summer fondly, and as this summer rapidly aproaches I half-heartedly wish that I could just relive the moments of my last summer. Unfortunately, that's called 'dwelling', and isn't really healthy...
At this time last summer, I was falling for this guy. I had all these friends, good enough grades, and my grandparents were blissfully ignorant of my existance. The boy I met made it alright that I felt like nothing to my family, and with him I felt like I was bullet proof. It was april, but the weather was far warmer and much more sunny. I remember at about this time I was making him a very ugly, uncoordinated hemp bracelet for his birthday... I remember giving it to him in the parking lot at the mall, my face red as he unwrapped the gold paper and beamed at me.
It was all knotted up and the strings were too long and I think I had missed a stitch or two somewhere because it looked really uneven on his small wrist. He put it on right then and there, even though I was embarrassed at it's hideous and unfitting appearance. It was simple in those days to be happy. I was seventeen, I was in love, and everything seemed like a fairy tale. Now I don't think I even believe in love or in fairy tales or any of that. I just live each day doing whatever mundane things I have to until I can go to sleep and wake up again.
I know there are opportunities that will appear as time goes on and all that. I keep being preached at like there will be some sort of revelation one day and everything will go back to being sunshine and rainbows, but I know a little more than I did last year. I've been fortunate enough to take lessons from the time that has passed.
I remember may, talk of graduation and summer plans like everything in the world was at our feet. Like we couldn't fall as long as we walked the road of life hand in hand, ignorance riding on our backs. I guess it's called childhood innocence, and I miss it but at the same time feel a little better knowing I've been made smarter by the destruction of the last part of my innocence. He put a list on myspace of all the things we wanted to do over those three short months of the summer. Things like going to the drive-in movies, buying suspenders, and the emmett cherry festival. Simple things, because things were simple in those days. Now I'm once again looking at May as it comes, and I'm thinking about absolutely nothing. I don't even know what I'm doing or where I'm going. I wish things could have remained simple after he left, but that's one of those lessons I learned from the passing of time.
Nothing lasts forever. Not your first love, not the perfect summer, and not that childhood happiness. Everything changes in time, because nothing about humanity is solid. It's changing constantly. Then of course we progressed into June, July, and August. The summer. Ah, it's rapidly aproaching again. I guess that's why my head is becoming stuck on memories again. The way everything looks shiney in the sun, the way the air tastes the same and the sweat that gathers... All of it is the same, minus him of course.
I honestly don't remember everything that took up my summer. I know I spent almost all day every day with him, and I know we had fun. I believe we spent a lot of time in cars in parking lots, but that's a secret. Some of my memories seem too good to be true, so I'll write them off as dreams and spare any readers the pain of listening to my over romanticised heart.
The point to all of this is that I'm sad. But I'm also smarter. As my favorite song puts it "This time baby, I'll be bullet proof"... I've learned from that, and the year is starting to repeat itself. This time, I plan on being bullet proof. Each moment is a chance to change whatever went wrong in that moment in the past. I'm in april again. I have memories of april's that have passed, and I have hopes for the aprils that have yet to come. I don't worry though, I know that I'm a little better off. I've grown up through change, and time will continue to change me and the people around me. I can only accept it and move on.

Escapes

Once upon a time there was a such thing as "playing outside". It's an elusive form of entertainment our parents, maybe not even that generation, enjoyed. Children these days enjoy the world of WOW, we escape into myspace and frollic on our blogs. We text our friends as opposed to actually speaking to them, and we would be lost in the normal world if electronics vanished.

I ask myself what I would do without my telephone, how I would survive without myspace email and facebook conversations!? How would I know when my friends' birthdays are? How would I see them without folders of all their pictures to look at!? It's such a monsterous thought, I know.

There is a sight called MNI, it's a fan sight for *cough cough* Harry Potter *cough cough* where people such as me, and many other die hard fans, can role play fictional characters in the world created for Harry Potter by JK Rowling. It's been a sight I've been addicted to for a few years now, and unfortunately for a while I got so absorbed in the fictional lives I was leading in my role play games I was more the fake person than real. It was the perfect escape, as socially rejected as RP games are.

And then of course there are books and magazines and television. So instead of actually going out and living life, we can read or watch other people doing it from our living rooms. I am more resigned to thinking that one day we're going to run out of things to invent and children will actually have to go outside to live life, and grown ups too (just for the sake of using the word "grown ups as if the title makes them any different from kids! pfsh)

Right now, I'm typing this up on the one thing that keeps me breathing (my dear computer!), but after I'm going to try to get outside in the real world where it matters.... (: because there is a life to live that I keep missing out on.