Thing 010: Withering Sights

January 10th: Whatever it should be classified as, it’s deep.

I want to tell you another story and, by chance, this one also involves a girl. She is the focus. The funny thing about this story is that the line between fiction and non-fiction is a bit blurrier here than it has been in the past. As I am thinking this story out, writing it down, I’m not entirely sure where I shall exaggerate, or if I will exaggerate at all. I will tell you that the subject matter, the girl, is real. She exists, as do I – the storyteller.

See, there was this young girl. Well, there is this young girl. She’s not dead, she still exists and I’m not going to be as cliché as to kill her off by the end for my own melancholy, self-serving narrative. And, when I say young, the funny thing is that she is actually older than I. I’m not exactly sure how much older. I don’t think I ever was. I’ve never had a mind for smaller details that other people find quite important. All amount of dates and times and math gets lost in the annals of my mind. It’s not the best of traits, but usually I get through situations where that kind of thing would cause trouble with a bit of my own charm, something that I’d probably be dead without by now. Anyway, I’m not exactly sure how much older she is. More than a year, less than two.

I’ve not spoken to her in many months, but I want to tell you all about her.

She and I met in a world that does not exist, a world of fanciful stories and narratives that went on and on like streets in a city. At one point it was populated like a city too, but as time went on this world lost its storytellers, the people that made up its amazing nucleus of minds. In the end, all that was left was a group of ramblers, her, and me. Now long before this world had become the depopulated mess that it had, we’d met by chance. You see, some of the stories I told there – while very cliché, as I was a bit younger, quite a bit younger. I imagine I must have been twelve or thirteen. Mathematically, that is not so far from my current age. But in all actuality, it is quite far indeed. We met because, though my stories were cliché, they were fascinating, especially to young minds who gravitate to what they know as they try to formulate who they are.

I won’t tell you what her name was, it doesn’t matter. It was a very unique one. I will tell you that her name, her first name, was shared by some of the greatest authoresses to ever live. Their tales are timeless, still read, still studied, and still debated to this day. Her name carried a connotation of mystique and a wonderful use of words that she lived up to very well. That she did. I didn’t know her name at first; this was a world where people used fake names, aliases, sobriquets. Hers was Sandstorm. She named herself after a natural phenomenon in which wind whips up loose bits of earth and blows them about violently. They are very destructive, and very beautiful. And, as cliché as this sounds (for I suppose I have not traipsed far from those roots), so was she. Destructive and beautiful and wonderful and… sand. Sand that conquered the landscape around it and mystified you from afar. As you got closer, you would just wonder and weep as you saw what it did. What it caused. A natural sandstorm causes quite a few problems for anyone living in the area around it, but the sandstorm that was she caused in a young me emotion. She stirred within me, as the winds stirred the sands, feelings that I had never experienced before. I don’t know if I will again. But feelings that I shall never forget, whether I live them once more or a hundred times more with anyone. She stirred within me the sands of love. Of passion. Of inspiration.

That is where it most heavily affected me, inspiration. When we first met, I’d just been learning about the wonderful world of poetry and I was not very good at it. My verses, my stanzas were bland and tasteless – gray. But as I spoke to her in those early days, before we knew each other’s names, before we knew anything about each other, I felt in the back of my mind an ignition. A slow start that crept forward over a period of years – two years. After two years, we were friends.  We had told stories together. I had mine and she had hers. And both of our stories were fanciful, both of our stories were cliché, both of them very good for people so young, and they continued to evolve and become grand over that period of two years. Eventually, we began to talk as friends and we learned more about each other; we learned each other’s names, our passions, what we loved. Through her I discovered a good amount of culture I’d never been exposed to for one reason or another. We shared The Beatles, we shared Japanese role-playing games, and we shared stories - the ones that inspired us to tell our own, to strive to be better at crafting narratives and harnessing the unbridled power of words.

She had a very clearly defined list of influences, of what she wanted to be like and whom she wished to emulate. Memoirs of a Geisha was primary among them. I never bothered to read it myself, but something about the way that Arthur Golden wrote fascinated her and drove here to constantly try harder to be more like him. She wanted to be able to tell a story as sweeping and endearing as the one he had and that goal was an admirable one.

I myself just knew I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories to make other people happy and to make them think. I had unfortunately not encountered any specific piece of work that inspired me, a fact I blame for the colorless nature of my early works. It wasn’t until I felt something for her that my words truly bloomed for the first time, and the works I took in refuge when it all was over were where I found the voices I wished to echo. I found Vonnegut. I found Salinger. I found my voice.

There was never any sexual nature behind any of it. I don’t think there ever would have been. It was strange and different, to feel what I did and not have the urges my peers associated with it, the urges they continued to tell me about in inglorious detail and openly question when I was withdrawn during such conversation. I remember one particular, round-table discussion going something like this:

“I love you!” One girl said to me in a friendly manner.

“Haha, thanks.” I replied.

“Why won’t you say it back?” She asked.

“He doesn’t believe in love.” A fellow sitting across from me said.

“Holy shit.” I said.

            I believe in love. I believe in it as a very powerful thing that people can feel for one another. I did not feel it for this girl in particular. She was not the kind of person I cared for in any capacity, let alone loved. I did, however, love the young writer who, at this point in time, was no longer speaking to me. It was a strange relationship.

            It took me awhile, but I had finally admitted my feelings for her. I composed a poem that was fully inspired and free, but did not fall into the disgusting world of free-form, non-rhyming dreck that I have since composed with great vigor. It was heart-felt. That was meaningful. I read it to her, I told her everything.

She told me I needed to wait until she was in ‘off to university.’

She needed time to breathe, desired that I make a commitment that seemed impossible.

So I said ‘No.’

            I said ‘no’ in a great many more words. I tried to explain how any day; someone else could walk into her life or mine between then and her college days. That chaos theory was the only god we bowed before, despite her religious roots, and it had us completely at its mercy.

She didn’t care.

            It didn’t matter what I wanted to say or how I said it. My words were useless weapons and our ‘love,’ to quote the prophet Pat Benetar, was a battlefield.

See what I mean about clichés? They keep working themselves in, even now.

            So we parted ways, so to speak. We each continued to live our lives independent of each other. There were no more discussions about Final Fantasy, or whatever weird foreign band she was into that I listened to just to try and identify. No longer did we stay up late to talk about what the lyrics to songs from Abbey Road meant to us. And no more did we talk about the strange machinations inside that acted up whenever we talked to each other, felt the presence of the other on the opposite side of an enormous, globe-spanning wall of glass.

            I missed her. I still do, admittedly. I’ve not felt what I felt for her since. The way she made me think was unique, something I found quite appealing after so long in one area. Her opinions were strong, and her head harder, but I loved it and I loved her. I wanted to do whatever I could to make her just talk to me. For several months after we severed ties, I tried to reestablish communication in one form or another. It never really panned out. Only once did I ever get any form of reply.

            She told me that the knowledge of my ‘love’ was uncomfortable for her. That she felt I was a stranger who knew nothing about her and that we had never met.

            This was coming from a young woman who knew more about me than just about anyone else. The words were harsh and biting, they left me with a sour taste in my mouth and salt in my wounds. Cliché again. But it was hard to read. Hard to hear. That was the last we spoke. I didn’t try again after that and I never will. What she said was unfair and unlike her. I don’t know why it would come to that, you’d think I’d have done some serious wrong. I don’t know.

            I don’t know if I’ll ever find anyone who will make me feel that way again. I’ve seen people, talked to people, who give me inklings of it. Girls who really capture me in some way or another, but never in the same way. I think part of the problem there was that I was holding on to the hope of rekindling what was obviously dead. A false hope, a silly hope, but a hope nonetheless. I wanted to convince her of something she had already thoroughly decided wasn’t going to happen. So it goes.

            If anything, now I can move on. Having it all done with, our communications ended with a poison sting… and the story finally out in the open. I can perhaps now find someone new and proceed with some shred of self-confidence, instead of having it wrapped around a hopeless fight elsewhere. Maybe now I can find another young woman who can make me think and compose as well as she did. Maybe even better than that. I am much better now, after all.

            Hey. Could I write you a love poem? Would you think me clichéd? Could we stay up for hours and talk about music, about how the lyrics of a certain song really got to you? How about if we got together and thought up the plot to an epic story full of romance and intrigue, and then never wrote it?

Maybe we could.