A la Node

5 – Amy

It was spring, on one of those almost warm days with occasional bursts of chill wind, that I saw her walking down the street in a city two thousand miles from where I had known her. She was burdened by the accessories of motherhood and herding two young children along ahead of her. They had her friendly smile and her dark brown curly hair.

I didn’t think that I remembered her face, after so long, so many years. On the rare occasions when I thought about her, I found that I couldn’t actually remember what she looked like. The shape of her was pressed into the soft clay of my memories, but it was a negative, only empty space in the shape of ancient and forgotten pain. The harried but pretty face, lined with the twenty years since I had seen her last, reached deep inside of me and filled that impression with color and flesh and memory. With a sense of certainty I often lack with people I haven’t seen in only a year, I knew it was definitely, impossibly, her.

I developed my crush on Amy in middle school, and it is hard now to remember just when, what grade, what year, what class. It is as hard to remember precisely what I saw in her as it is to remember when I saw it. There simply came a time when I realized loneliness, went seeking a cure, and found myself somehow in her orbit.

I was not an intuitive boy. The social rules and regulations that everyone seemed to live by were a grey and uncertain area to me. They were to everyone, I suppose, at least to some degree, but that’s not easy to see from the perspective of adolescence. For me, it seemed a world in which everyone knew what to do, how to act. Everyone had a group of friends into which they fit smoothly and perfectly, and everyone fell easily into the activities that suited them. Everyone had a sport, a band, a comic book hero, a favorite color, a boy or a girl they liked.

No, that is the self-pitying voice of cynical age speaking. I can’t claim to have been so deluded or blind, nor to have been so isolated from the winds of that childish culture, without also claiming myself to have been pathetically stupid. I don’t think I am being disingenuous when I say that I was not as socially apt, nor as liked, nor as comfortable as many of my ostensible friends at the time, but the story I like to tell myself, I have to acknowledge, may serve a comforting self image more than it serves accuracy.

In that way that our society habitually crushes the wild impulses of youth, I found my more creative impulses brought to me a certain undermining attention from peers and adults. Subtly, the confusion and disapproval that met my persistent need to distinguish myself from the crowd ate away at a self confidence founded not on achievement but merely the absence of censure.

I can almost remember the day that painful self-consciousness burst in my mind like a vein and saturated everything I did. Perhaps it was the day I brought a bottle of Tabasco to class, and dared someone to taste it. I liked Tabasco, and at the time it seemed perfectly natural and fun to do this, though the management seemed to disagree. Perhaps it was the Halloween, where my carefully painted alien mask, intended to adhere to my face and dramatically transform it, instead creased and refused to stick and became a mess of unrecognizable rubber and grease makeup. Perhaps it was a day on which nothing much happened at all, but in which I heard something, saw something, felt something, and suddenly knew that other people were looking at me, other people thought I was strange, or dumb, or pitiful. One day, for no reason I can precisely state I began to care what other people thought about me, and was crushed.

I remember the scent of cherry Jolly Ranchers candy. Not so much the flavor, but the sweet-tangy scent that hangs in the air around anyone eating them. There was a powerful and childish sensuality to the smell of cherry Jolly Ranchers hanging in the air around a girl. An image in flavor and scent, as tactile and physical as any memory of running or falling or sex persists in my mind even now, of sweet cherry and Amy’s flowery scent. I chose her. Maybe it was the girly/candy perfume of her, or her face with its big smile and brown eyes. Maybe it was nothing at all.

I experimented at first, probing at the notion of liking a girl from several directions as if it were a loose tooth. Some deep part of me had always wanted a kiss, an unnameable passion, the feel of flesh on flesh. I remember vivid fantasies in early childhood, of rolling around with another body, of having a girl to kiss, of elaborate fantasies of adventure and rescue and love. Long before the concept of sex ever entered my mind, I wanted her. Any her.

I had chosen, in the same sort of way, Spider-man. Long before Amy, in that dawning of realization that there were social structures and rules all around me that I was meant to fit into, I saw that all the boys my age liked one of the major superheros. So I set about trying to find one to like as well. I found a trade paperback of compiled Spider-man comics, and armed with this foundation simply decided that I Liked Spider-man. He looked cool, and he was convenient, as I had a number of comics in one book. I read a lot of it, though I found it a bit dull, a bit silly. It did not stand up well to Madeline L’Engle.

In the same way, I had chosen bowling as “my sport” some time before, and Billy Joel, “my music”. I would choose something others did not obviously like, feeling that I needed to be distinctive, but I chose at all because it seemed like I was supposed to have those preferences. I believe I even watched as much as half an hour of bowling, though whether it was to convince myself or my family, I don’t know.

So there were little exploratory attractions. Girls who had been nice to me, girls that were pretty. I felt the combined pressures of loneliness and expectation hanging over my shoulder, urging me to choose someone, pursue someone, have someone. In the dark soil of my mind, where the combined dross of shame, isolation and puberty’s hormonal train-wreck, a seed was growing. I looked at her one day. “I love her”, said a voice in my mind, and like a fool, I believed it.

Middle school is hell. It is a hothouse for every ill feeling, every hormone induced bout of insanity, every worst impulse. For a kid who was smarter than most, taller than most, who walked around staring at the ground, or into a paperback book, who had few friends and no social graces, it was a place where that seed of depression could be nurtured into full bloom. Perhaps Amy was some desperate gambit for companionship and respite against the increasingly hostile and alien world without and within, but depression is funny thing. When I told her by way of awkward note how I felt about her, how I had felt about her for months, and she wordlessly put the note away and refused to say anything, the depression was there and waiting.

It is not that you feel sad about something. Not even that you feel sad about nothing. It is a darkness with the texture of hopelessness and obsession and lethargy and hurt. It has no reason and no cause, but give it an excuse and it will gladly take it. I was lonely, I thought, and this was the reason I stared out the window of my bedroom at three AM, wanting to cry, wanting to hurl myself out into the night and die on the grass. I was lonely and needed a girlfriend, and when that image of the girlfriend whose loving presence would drive out the dark took on Amy’s face, the depression had all the excuse it needed. Amy did not love me back, clearly this was why my internal universe was so cold and black.

It turned out to be an inexhaustible well of justification. Amy, who was outwardly friendly, who said hi, who was there on the trip to the Model United nations where we all represented Lybia, and where, on the slippery frosted grass one evening I made her laugh by pretending to be unable to walk up an icy hill, and where at dinner she put her hand accidentally into the cheesecake and laughed delightfully as she licked the sticky red cherry sauce from her wrist, Amy who was in every way wonderful, Amy, oh beautiful and vivacious and funny Amy would not tell me that she didn’t like me.

I may not have been rational, and my sudden and intense love for this girl who seemed to have no interest in me was built on the flimsiest of foundations, but I was, I liked to think, a smart guy. A logical guy. Scientific. So when I looked at the situation and it seemed plain to me that things were not exactly coming together between the two of us, I decided that if she would just tell me yes or no, just give me some indication, then I could abide by her desires. In fact, I loved her, so I could congratulate myself on acceding to her desire for me to leave her alone if that was what would make her happy. All she had to do was say.

I can’t put myself back into the mindset I had then. I can’t tell you why I persisted, beyond that I know myself to be stubborn beyond reason, and that depression is a subtle killer. When I was low, and I was often low, Amy was all the reason I needed for feeling that way. I would write her notes. I wrote her one in French. I would slip them into her books if I saw she had put them down for gym class where I could get to them. I gave her gifts. I was aware of her friends, who I am sure ridiculed me, read my heartsick letters to her, and perhaps even pitied me, but they were just distant shadows of the ill feeling that saturated my life. Just external aspects to the derisive self that watched all I was doing and hated me for my idiocy. That self hated her, as well, I think. I wanted to scream at her, demand that she tell me she hated me so that I could let go. I wanted to kiss her.

The depression that had grown into me took its physical toll. Aspects of it drove my obsession with Amy, while others took delight in hating myself for such weakness and stupidity. I became insomniac, fatigued, sick. I missed school, became further isolated and alienated, and always there to give proof to the feeling that life was misery, Amy.

I can’t blame her, though I did. What it must have been like for her to be the object of such obsession I cannot speculate on – I only know that I begged her to just tell me, tell me she hated me, so I could let go. Maybe it was even true, maybe I would have, but the depression would have found another reason for itself, I know that now. At the time, she was cruel beyond words, silent in the face of my need, and love mingled with hatred mingled with the scent of a pretty girl and sweet cherry.

Sometime in high school, I gave up. It took that long, and by then the depression and insomnia had left me at the bottom of a very deep pit. This I never blamed on Amy, or even on my obsession with her. I blamed myself, and there was plenty of self-pity to go around. I began the slow hard slog back up out of the trench I had worn into my own mind. She had been the center of my personal universe, but when I let her go she seemed so small. Just another hurt in a world of hurts. I moved on, feeling broken but no longer attached.

There were other loves. I can’t say I knew any better how to deal with them than I had with Amy. It took a long time to learn how to communicate, to catch up on all the social rules that others had learned while I was spending my time moping after a girl who never cared. I made plenty of mistakes, but grew, and loved, and was loved. Eventually.

I saw her walking down the street, children laughing, and I must have stared. She smiled at me, but there was no recognition on her eyes, just Amy, being friendly, being nice. I smiled back and walked along down the sidewalk.