There were others who left without dying, of course.
My best friend in junior high was a spunky girl named Carlye. We met in 7th grade, because we were forced to feign being musical for two years and we both chose choir over band. She played basketball, as did I, and the year our extra-curricular AAU team took the city championships we played together. She was shorter than I was, blonder. Her laugh was loud and genuine, and she was endlessly ticklish. Hoopfest teams, slumber parties, talks of her first kiss, and talk of the promise of mine, characterized our relationship. We spent weekends and evenings together, summer days by the pool when we weren’t on a basketball court. We had mutual friends, but she knew me best. My mom and her mom got along famously; she had a little sister around the same age as my little sister, and it looked to be a friendship match made in heaven. Then, the summer before our freshman year of high school, she moved. A mere hour away, and yet the distance was palpable, as neither of us had driver’s licenses, or cars. My mom and hers would drive half-way between our two cities and I would wave my mother goodbye and spend two days with my best of all friends; the next weekend she would do the same. For awhile we did that, meeting in the middle, spending time together. But as weeks, months and years passed the visits happened with less and less frequency. We were both busy. Busy with school, playing basketball, making new friends and trying to keep A averages. I saw her less and less, and then, not at all.
After Carlye left two more of my closest friends moved away from our city, away from me. I missed Lisa and Erin immensely, though for awhile we tried writing letters, meeting at basketball camps in the summer-time, or at Priest Lake where we spent weekends training our skin to look darker, swimming and magazine-reading, day-dreaming about boys we would never meet. We fell apart, and then together, further apart, and then closer together. It was a rhythm I grew accustomed to, but one I never appreciated. There were days I was inconsolable, days my mother walked in on me sobbing myself to sleep. She held me and told me it would be OK. I didn’t believe her. The only “OK” I knew was a compromised, imperfect version. It was never the way it was, the way I wanted it. It would never be.
My first kiss turned into an eight year on-again off-again relationship with a boy who couldn’t decide what he wanted and so routinely left and returned, left and returned for all of those eight years. He became finely skilled in the art of leaving, having at one point in his young life given up on everyone, including himself. He sunk himself into a vat of sticky despair and before I knew it I was convincing myself I could save him, proclaiming fearlessly that I would pull him out of his self-imposed darkness. My naiveté was not an ample life-preserver, and instead of me rescuing him he pulled me into his sticky vat to sit with him, covering me in excuses and melancholy, marinating me in guilt and self-doubt. I crawled out of that coupledom reeking of someone not me, my hair, my skin, my faith in myself as matted and dark as his outlook on life.
When a man I dated for less than a year left me I was ready for it, but not prepared for how badly it would hurt, ill-equipped for how much it would break me. He had tried leaving before I miscarried, but had ultimately stayed. Stayed of his own accord and yet our relationship was damaged, our trust in one another hanging by conversational threads. He promised he would stay. I wanted so much to believe him, and so I pretended to hang on his every word in a feeble attempt to make semantics a reality. A week after I lost what had begun growing inside of me, on the anniversary of my father’s death, we said goodbye. Goodbye for good, and the part of me that so passionately, so recklessly, so fearlessly wanted to love him, that part of me stopped breathing.
There were others who left without dying, of course.
So beautiful. And sad. I don’t think I have the heart to write about things like this, but then you do and I think, hey, maybe.
I am constantly amazed how you can put memories like those up there in words.
I struggle with being able to explain (in my head) things that I experienced to me when I was younger… let alone blog about them for others to read.
You’re a brave girl.
scratch the “to me” in my comment. Too many thoughts in my head… *ha*
I am speechless, Kerri. Your words, and how you use them, leave me with none of my own.
Kerri, that second-to-last paragraph was just about perfectly written. Wow.
Beautifully written post, and thank you for sharing your humanity. Hugs to you.
gah. you break my heart sometimes, kid.
if you want some good cheer, i passed on an award for you at my place.
you are such a wise woman and you’re practically still a girl. i can’t believe how much you’ve been through kerrianne! *hugs*
you are killing me with these posts.
they are just amazing.
really.
You are a beautiful writer, Kerri.
My first kiss was on again/off again for ten years. The years of tumult and torture!
Thanks for sharing this part of your life! Since the world moves in circle, do these people ever come back?
Hello! I found your site through alyndabear.com. I just wanted to leave a comment letting you know that I fell in love with your blog when, while reading your ‘about me’ me page, I found out that you own a pug!! Iggy is sooo adorable. I also have a one-year-old pug. He is fawn and his name is Hamlet. =D Here is his flickr page: http://flickr.com/photos/hamletthepug
I need to add new pictures of him!
Anyway, I am going to add your blog to my favorites.
-Jessy
I have saved this post in my reader for more than two weeks, simply because I wanted to do it justice by saying the right words. But alas, words still fail me.
I have felt all the same things you have, only under different circumstances. Being forced to let go of people I’m not ready to let go of, accepting endings that I did not plan. And feeling alone.
Wow. I don’t even know what to say. You have such a way with words. You are mazing.
All I can offer is a HUG!
This is so beautifully written and so sad, but also gives me hope. That same part of me hasn’t started breathing again, I don’t think, but you show me that it can.