Like a crocodile

This was my first memoir piece.  Except for the first week, when we were instructed to go shorter so everyone could read,  for the entire class our only assignment was to write three pages that might conceivably be in our memoir (and critique our classmates' pieces).   One of the fascinating bits of the assignment I thought was that we were supposed to title every piece, the professor believed titling things was an extremely hard thing to do, and so we should practice often.  This one was called like a crocodile.

We'd had to write a paragraph about why we were taking the class on the first day, and I used the phrase "Unsympathetic Narrator".  I thought it was just a play on unreliable then, about being someone who tells a story in a way that leads the reader to have absolutely no sympathy for the writer.  Someone in the class regularly critiqued me for indulging in too much self pity in my writing, but another classmate informed me that she'd be heartened to see some self-pity, that it would be a kindness to the me I was writing about that I hadn't been showing much of.  And then I realized that the unsympathetic goes at least two ways, I am also (usually) unsympathetic to me.  

***

The truth isn’t just one thing. All those police procedurals tell us that eyewitnesses are unreliable and so here I am, unreliable eyewitness to all the things that keep happening. I impose narrative structures on unrelated things, wanting to make sense of each event and even moments later, I can’t tell what actually happened, if there is such a thing, and what is only the parts that reinforce whatever framework I’m pretending my life has.

Lesson was my first love. We were teenagers, he was dating someone else, we almost never touched. But we hung out in bookstores, reading each other poetry, telling everyone we were someplace else, with someone else even before I was shunned. We swapped Tori Amos bootlegs and Sandman comics, watched Kurosawa movies together. We wore flannels, played Magic the Gathering, did our Latin homework together, laid on the trampoline in his backyard and talked, staring up at the sky, close enough that I could feel him in the tiny  hairs of my arm, even if we didn’t touch.  We talked every night on the phone, he’d click over to the other line to tell me his girlfriend had called, and some nights, he’d hang up on me, and some nights he’d hang up on her.

We ended up kissing in a parked and running car in the post-Christmas days of December, two years later, and I remember being worried that he’d be able to taste the crazy on me, convinced that it would taste like aluminum foil. Or blood.

But high school happened. His best friend’s mother, my English teacher, decided that I was anathema and that none of them should speak to me again. She told me “sometimes when we need love the most, we deserve it the least” and sounded like she was doing me a favor. I believed her, and it made perfect sense that the entire group - Lesson, Lesson’s girlfriend, the aforementioned best friend, his girlfriend and an assorted cast of characters - would stop talking to me on her say-so.

Lesson saw me in secret, occasionally telling the others he was using me for my Latin homework, or that he had to babysit his little sister. We didn’t go out in public anymore, he couldn’t be seen with me, the closest we’d get was meeting behind the Taco Bell, where I’d sit on a pile of torn-up concrete slabs smoking, and he’d pace and tell me how hard this was for him. My only moment of something like pride had me wearing too much vanilla oil and rubbing my wrists all over the upholstery of his car, a tiny olfactory claim.

When I write about him in my journals, I call him Lesson. He told me that I should never learn the lesson that his actions were teaching me, the melodramatic self-aggrandizing asshole. But he also gave me my favorite backhanded compliment, telling me that I was patient like a crocodile, lying in wait for him to fuck up, even if nothing ever changed when he did. I loved that image, predatory patience. I still do.

We spent the next eight or so years drifting in and out of each others’ lives, doing different kinds of damage every time.  Eventually, we lost touch. I used to tell myself that time brings everyone who isn’t an asshole back around, trying to absolve myself. Some nights, I still miss him. Some nights, I still believe he was right, I’m not worth keeping.  But on some nights I remember - fuck that noise.