Monday 16 January 2012

The Story - Part 1

With everything that's been happening in the last few weeks, life has sort of come unstuck. I've been channeling a lot of my time and energy into exercise to keep myself occupied, but it's not quite enough. So I have started writing. I'm not sure if this is any good, I'm not sure if it means anything and I'm not sure if there is a point to it, but I need to focus my energy on something and writing this story is helping. It's rough and it's very personal but it's also something I feel I need to put into words. I hope to add more to this as I continue to write it and hopefully finish it some day. But until then here is the first part, also known as all I have done so far.

THE STORY - PART 1


It was 2002. He was 17. She was 14. They didn’t know each other and they had never met, but the first time he saw her, he knew. He knew they would be together. He felt it and so it had to be.  He had no idea what she felt or thought. They weren’t friends and they had never spoke, but he was sure there must be a connection between the two.

He had come to the school the previous year for two equally misguided and foolish reasons. The first, was for a girl. He thought he was in love with her and convinced his Mum to let him change to a new school in the middle of Year 10 so he could spend more time with her. Foolish. The second reason was to get away from his old school and the relentless bullying he suffered there. Everyday he heard, “FAGGOT!” “HOMO!” “OI GAY CUNT” and many more of the amazingly brilliant ways teenagers call someone homosexual. He was running away from something and towards something else. Maybe he thought that if he left and went to a new school where he had a girlfriend, nobody could or would call him gay again. He was wrong.

When somebody new starts at a school, everyone is instantly curious about why they are there and where they came from. Unfortunately for him, this new school contained kids from his old school as well as kids who were friends with his tormentors. Not even moving to the new school with a girlfriend was enough to rid him of this notorious and fabricated identity. It was nowhere near as bad though so he thought he would ride it out and it would eventually die down, especially because he had a girlfriend. The relationship, if it can be called that, didn’t last, but two things the girl had said to him stuck with him forever and changed his opinion of himself and of relationships. She had said “You are ok looking, but it’s not like you’re really hot or anything” and “It isn’t real love. It’s just pizza love”. He had to ask the girl to explain that one. “It means, like you know how you like pizza and its awesome sometimes, but you couldn’t really see yourself having pizza forever. You know, you would prefer steak or something”. He thought he understood what she meant.

At the time the first comment cut him deep. Every young boy has a massive ego and he was no exception, He couldn’t believe she was saying he was ugly, She wasn’t, but in his mind she was. He didn’t understand that beauty or “hotness” is subjective and he resigned himself to the fact that he was ugly and was going to be alone. Eventually he got over it. After the first girl broke up with him he was able to capitalise on the “new guy” phenomenon and had quite a few girls talking about him or chasing him. He still got called gay though.

The second comment cut deeper and still stings him today. What the girl was trying to explain, with a clumsy and ill fitting food analogy (especially since pizza is amazing and who wouldn’t want it for every meal), was that she couldn’t see herself being with him for the rest of her life. He was a pit stop, a detour, a speed hump on the road of love. He wasn’t the type of person the girl could see herself married to. The first girls love affair with “pizza” lasted only a few months.  But her love affair, this unknown girl, with whom he assumed he had a destiny, her love affair with “pizza” lasted 10 years before her tastes changed.

2002. He had spent the second half of 2001 at the new school and now he was settled in. He had mates and he was happy. Even though he didn’t have a girlfriend. It was a crappy school, in a crappy town in the centre of Victoria. The school was a microcosm of the town. It was filled with bogans, druggies, footy players, bitches, cool kids, nerds and so on. He straddled the line between nerd, smoker and cool kid. Well he thought he was cool anyway. At this point he wasn’t particularly interested in girls, he was still slightly jaded from his experience of moving to this new school and he was having fun going to parties and just trying to “pick up”. He had some success and was content with that. He’d heard about some new girl at school. Everyone was talking about how they were going to fuck her stupid or pick her up or some other stupid, teenage fantasy. He hadn’t seen her, but if all the other guys were going this stupid she must be something special to look at.

It wasn’t a particularly large school, but he still hadn’t really seen, or noticed her a few months into the year. By then he had a really good and small group of friends, which now included “her” brother. Not that he knew that at the time. Him and the brother became fast friends. He thought the brother was a great guy and really cool because he lived by himself in a house just around the corner from the school. It was perfect for wagging school, weekend hang outs or pretty much anything else. Not parents around to ruin the fun. Just constant video games and underage drinking and smoking. It was the life, or so he thought. It was around the time that he started spending a lot of time at the brothers house that he finally met her. She stayed there occasionally and would often go there after school to be picked up by her Mum.

It was just like any other day, he was strolling down the tech wing, which was in actual fact a large shed like structure which housed the technical classes offered by the school along with a few hundred lockers, when he saw a girl. She had dark hair, tight jeans and a FUBU jacket. She was walking by herself, parting the crowd as she moved. He was with his friends, but not the brother, and was transfixed. “Who is that?” he asked. “That’s his sister” said one mate pointing at the brother who was approaching. He was stunned, he had never seen a girl before that he had so instantly wanted to know, to kiss, to touch. He felt it in his head and his gut. “She’s not single man” mentioned his friend and he was shattered.

He got to know her over the next month or so as she went from one boyfriend to another. But the boy was patient and he knew that eventually she would see him as he saw her.  He heard the news that she was single and from that point forward he dedicated all of his time to spending time at the brothers house, hanging out with the girl, getting to know her and eventually getting the courage to ask her out. He even asked the brother if it was ok for him to ask the girl out. The brother was fine with it.

One night after school at the house, the boy was talking to the girl in the kitchen. She was sitting on the bench and he was standing nearby, leaning on the bench. They talked about nothing really, but the boy felt so happy just being with her and near her that when he left he was beaming. He practically skipped to the train station and caught his train home. When he got there he went to the nearest payphone and called his best friend.
“Hey man, guess what?!”
“What?”
“I want to go out with his sister. I really like her man”
“I knew you were gonna say that. I could tell for a while”
“Really? Oh well I don’t care, I like her heaps and I’m gonna ask her out at basketball”
“Cool man. Good luck”
“Thanks man, see ya later”

At school over the next few days the boy spent a little bit of time with the boy but not more than usual. The boy, his best friend and the girl all shared a maths class. Maths methods. The best friend knew how the boy felt and the boy was pretty sure the girl had an inkling, but the friend took it upon himself to really hammer the point home, in the most teenage and male of ways. On a table of four was the girl, another student, the best friend and the boy, all facing the same direction. The friend though the most witty and elegant way of bringing the two together was to throw balls of paper at the girl to get her attention. Once he had it he would point his steal ruler at the boy, as if it was him who had thrown the paper. The girl laughed, the boy felt embarrassed, but relived that the scheme had somewhat worked, and the best friend nudged and elbowed the boy.

TO CONTINUE

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