Posted By voncookie on February 28, 2010
Once upon a time, when I was a wee tot of almost thirteen, in the 8th grade, I was “going out” with a boy, a popular kid, a skate rat who wore jams and had long, long bangs that hung over his very blue eyes and round glasses. We flirted for a while, and then he passed me a note in homeroom, folded into a neat triangle that said he needed to talk to me immediately. I don’t remember the actual “asking out,” and God knows, “going out” when I was thirteen certainly did not imply that one was actually going anywhere, aside from maybe the skating rink or the rec field.
When Skate Rat asked me out, I did not know the gf protocol. I didn’t know what was to be done as part of a newly formed adolescent “couple.” I knew we had nice conversations on the phone at night. I also knew that we had NO classes together whatsoever, and that our schedules only coincided at lunch. But did it occur to me to uproot from my traditional lunch table where I was surrounded by my best friends and go sit with My Man at his table with the other skate rats and popular girls? No.
Or maybe it did.
Maybe I just didn’t want to.
My friends have always been important to me, and perhaps in the case in the case of the Skate Rat fiasco, they were too important. Why “fiasco”? Because one day, at lunch, as I sat rebelliously at my usual table, Skate Rat’s best friend (who *my* best friend had an undying crush on) came over to me and crouched down beside me, gnawing on a sandwich.
“Hey vonCookie,” he said, between large bites.
“Yeah”
“Skate Rat wants to break up with you.”
This was three weeks into our “relationship” and I was stunned. We had been getting along so well! We had slow danced at a party, played Spin-the-Bottle and 7 Minutes in Heaven. He was my first kiss. And he wanted to break up with me? Wha- wha- whaaaaaat?
But I didn’t say any of that. What I said was, “OK.”
Skate Rat’s buddy looked at me kind of shocked and said, “OK?” Big fat question mark on the end of that, as if he had been telling me a joke, and had expected me to laugh, get up, go to Skate Rat’s table and say, “Really, now. What’s this all about, cupcake?”
I gulped. “Yeah.”
“Oooooookaaaaay, then.” He said.
And that was the end of that. Skate Rat didn’t say a word to me for the rest of Middle AND High School, but that’s possibly because I was so infatuated with him that it was a little scary for him. No, scratch that. It was probably A LOT scary for him, such was the level of my obsession… ahem… read: devotion to him.
I asked myself in the months following the break-up if it had been the fact that I had not sat with him at lunch that had caused the demise of our relationship. If it was my obstinate independence and loyalty to my friends that caused me to lose out on love. One kiss — one seven-minute kiss — was all I got from it because I was not really down with the idea of giving up my laugh-a-minute friends for a shot at fleeting popularity as Skate Rat’s gf.
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “And so it goes…”
My life since my tween years has been a sort of tireless repeat of this same theme. Never wanting to give up my independence, I shy away from personal commitments and love affairs that require compromise and monogamy in the interest of preserving my freedom. I like the fact that I don’t have to okay it with anyone if I want to take off for Spain or the Yukon or Mongolia if I so desire. I refuse to move from my proverbial lunch table to be someone else’s, pardon the expression, bitch.
I live alone. I adore living alone. I get lonely, sure, but I am– in so doing — gloriously unhampered by the needs/desires of others. And the chaos of my apartment demonstrates the lawlessness that I feel in my own space. MY SPACE.
For these reasons, and for many others, I wonder if I’m not… what’s the word… doomed? condemned?… no those are all too negative… ah, here we go… simply destined to be by myself for the rest of my life.
I pity the fool — to quote the great Mr. T — who will have to deal with my relentless need for independence.
And maybe I pity myself a bit, because this is one thing that I simply refuse to compromise in any way.
Old maid? Perhaps. Spinster? Likely.
Free to be me, forever and ever?
Indubitably.
Delicious.
Category: A Cookie's Life, The Past is a Foreign Country |
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Tags: anecdote, life
