She was (and still is) four years older than I, or at least that's what I told someone once and have declared ever since. Much of what follows has the same dubious epistemology: a previous version of me, who was far closer to the truth, decided what would be remembered. Even memory is historical. No matter what he says, though, I was madly in love with her. To be more accurate: my love was mad, which is to say purely pathological, without reason or emotional soundness. It was love for love's sake, unsupported by any other feature or virtue of our circumstances.
But to my inexperienced psyche, our love was natural and essential. It seemed less human psychology and more the secretion of chemicals from deeply hidden organs that we share with ancient apes and lizards. It was ancient, arcane and so absolutely true.
As a record of this time, I have a shopping bag full of drafts of letters I never sent and intricately folded letters I received, each in minuscule handwriting. All will have to be burnt if I ever have children or achieve any sort of fame. They are, by far, the worst sort of sentimental, transcendental-love poetry ever conceived, all about stars (reflected in your eyes!) and open spaces (we will lie in the grass!) and the wind, lots about the wind.
I realize that the eyes I am using to survey the ruins of my adolescence are neither fair nor are they really mine (they are, however, the eyes I want you to think I have.) On the other hand, my memories consist of, at most, snapshots and snippets of conversations. Often the sensory aspects of my memories have faded and all that remains is the emotional hue of a situation; neither the reason for the event nor its consequence remains in my consciousness. So I will do the inevitable when writing something like this and run a couple of episodes together to get the flavor right.
Our last meeting took place like this: I had resigned myself to breaking up with her. Someone, I don't remember who (or rather I don't want to remember, because it was probably my mom) told me I should bring a rose and a poem, effectively schmaltzing her into submission. On her front door, which was unlatched and open a few inches, there was a post-it note complete with her customary sticker of a grinning mouse and the words "Come in!" scrawled in abnormally large print. A grinning mouse is how I think of her: tiny, with a quiet mousy voice and straight mousy hair and the insatiable desire to curl up in a little ball and hide from the world (a desire we will soon encounter.)
I entered, and stood dumbly at the apex of her split-level house. Everything was brown. The linoleum I was standing on was the golden-tan color of linoleum which imitates nothing but linoleum; the carpet in the rarely used living room was unabashedly brown, the color of a bear. The kitchen to the left was beige to match the beige refrigerator. The walls of the five stairs to the basement and the five up to the bedrooms were papered a rough off-white.
In an unconvincingly sleepy voice, she called to me from upstairs. Following her voice, I tiptoed up the stairs and pushed her bedroom door open. Her room was dark except for a digital clock that illuminated the back of her head in faint red light. I sat stiffly on the farthest corner of her bed from her. My throat dry, I said only "I have to go."
I repeated this sentence ten or fifteen times. Maybe more. She would whisper after each iteration, her voice heavy, "Why?" New at this, I offered explanations, reasons. I could have explained to her that her suicide threats scared me, that her hours of running bothered me, that her tantrums and her jealousy were hard to deal with, that I knew she had a boyfriend in Michigan. But I probably said only that I was unhappy, that she was leaving for college soon. I eventually curled with her in bed to stop her crying. I reassured her that this primal love we had, which was obviously a permanent feature of our lives, as immutable and irrevocable as a spleen, would bring us together again. Maybe a break was all we needed.
And then, I remember walking out of her room, and a haunting thought: "I will forget that and remember this instead." But I have no clue what "this" was, nor what the other option might have been. And I conveniently have no idea what transpired in the intervening hour. "Sorry," the politician says. "I simply don't recall."
As I sit here trying to remember that day, I am suddenly unsure if we ever had sex. This is one of those things I would hope to remember, but there is an oddly impenetrable fog that surrounds everything about her. I do recall a single moment, which both reassures and frightens me, and could easily have taken place on the afternoon in question. I am shirtless, she wearing only panties, and sitting on my chest. From the perspective I have here, typing at my computer, she is clearly getting off on my chest. But I am sure that at the time I had no idea what was happening. When she grabbed my hand a moment later and suggested what I might do with it, I pulled away and sat up, disoriented and confused, or so I remember.
I walked out the front door. She was right behind me, begging me to come back. And then, in a stroke of brilliance— of which she had many— she sprinted past me and began running down the street away from her house. I, taking up the psychopath role necessitated when dealing with a psychopath, ran after her. She increased her pace when I did, always keeping twenty feet between us. She was quite a runner and I was in terrible shape.
We entered the park a few doors down from her house and followed the stream there (as a hobby she had mapped miles of the river system that passed near her house, visiting towns and parks I'd never heard of.) She shot over her shoulder "Stop following me!" Continuing to play at ax-murderer I yelled after her "I just want to talk to you! Stop running!"
After maybe a mile of this we reached a large soccer field. She lay down in the middle of the field, curled into a ball, and refused to speak. I sat beside her, for a while trying to get her to talk, then silent. Over the trees to the west the sky began turning grey, then black, then green. The suddenly cold wind blew sand and leaves in my face, and I tried to get her up first by pleading, then by physically lifting her (she screamed and bit me,) then by pleading again. It began to hail.
Why do I conjure this ghost in order to murder it again? I do not take pleasure in mutilating her (though I get a certain smug satisfaction from embarrassing myself, as I notice the complacency of seeing how far I have come, of how much more I now know.) I haven't thought of her in years, and even then it was a fleeting thought that she was once in my life. But suddenly I see it: in her is the antecedent for nearly every significant event, every significant piece of my life (including those that I hold dearest, those that I find to be my most unique and fundamental features.) The evidence:
I became a vegetarian as soon as I arrived at college, and she was the only vegetarian I had ever known prior to the hordes I would later meet there. She was recovering or trying to recover from severe anorexia when I met her. In my second year of college, I fell the same way. Most worrisome, I remember running through a park one day in the fall of my sophomore year and feeling satisfied as I decided, at that moment, to be like her; to stop eating, and keep running.
While recovering from the disorder a year and a half later, I decided to stop training for a triathlon and discovered dance. I fell in love with it in a surprisingly unpathological (one might even say healthy) way. Since then, dance has mostly conquered my life.
It didn't come to mind then, but it strikes me now: her mom had aborted a dance career by getting pregnant. As a memento of this, she kept on the wall of the living room a poster of a dancer's scrawny veined calves balancing on battered pointe shoes. She married the father, a man fourteen years her senior, then divorced him (he moved three doors down the street and spent an inordinate amount of time in his car, parked across the street), and became a secretary. Where else could I have derived my fantasy of dance? I had no exposure to it; I don't think I even knew one could be a dancer, or an artist for that matter.
Most frightening is that I find her even in my romantic notion of love, which remains unabashedly sure that true love is monolithic, universal, archaic and permanently above or beyond petty worldly concerns. Who else could have taught me this?
I want to believe that I have come far from this point, and in the terms of time and experience (which are never separate,) I certainly have. Even so, in a strange way, I have kept my promise to her. We are not conjoined at the heart, but she is permanently ingrained in my brainstem, in my spine, and there she will stay for the rest of my life. No matter how much I would like to slough off this history, laugh it into a joke, it will be with me, even though I fail to remember it.
Milo Norton is a pseudonym. If you would like to be published in First Person Princeton, Street's student memoir section, email street@dailyprincetonian.com.
Read More
Princeton Zoning Board of Adjustment approves renovations to Tower and Charter Clubs
Sena Chang and Isaac BernsteinOn March 27, the Municipality of Princeton’s Zoning Board of Adjustment approved construction developments for Tower Club and Charter Club. Renovations for both clubs are aimed towards improving accessibility.
On March 27, the Municipality of Princeton’s Zoning Board of Adjustment approved construction developments for Tower Club and Charter Club. Renovations for both clubs are aimed towards improving accessibility.
Students support local businesses with new platform Zage
Jack AllenAfter hearing about the struggles faced by a number of these restaurants after students left campus in mid-March, Dilbagi created Zage, an online platform that allows community members to send money to local businesses now to redeem as credits on their purchases in the future.
This fall, go beyond the 'Bubble'
Dora ZhaoEven though classes are picking up, weekends are the perfect time for students to escape the Orange Bubble. While going out to eat on Nassau is enjoyable, there is so much to see beyond Princeton. For those looking for a day trip or a chance to explore the area outside of Princeton, here is a list of ideas to do this fall.