i wrote something today.

as the title implies, i wrote something today.  i can't decide if i want to keep going with it.  i have some ideas for plot development, and if so, this would probably actually be the middle of the story.  but this is what i wrote today.  any and all comments are welcome.  

happy reading!

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It’s hard not to notice the way he looks at me.  Like he knows me.  Even though we’ve never spoken to each other.  Even though I didn’t notice his existence until he sat in front of me in one of my English classes earlier this week.

At first, I wracked my brain.  Do I know him?  Have we met before?  No.  We don’t know each other.  His name is Connor James, I learned during roll call on that first day of class.  I looked him up on the student part of the school website.  He’s my year in school.  He’s from the area, where as I wanted nothing more than to escape my home, many states away.  And I don’t recognize anything about him.

So why does he look at me like that?

Finally, after seeing him watching me at every meal this week, pick up my tray and walk over to him.  I slam it a little too loudly on the table.  He flinches, but never breaks eye contact.  His friends all stare at me like I have two heads, and the girl sitting next to him tightens her grip on his upper arm.  They think I’m crazy.

So why does he stare at me?

“What do you want?” I ask, too harshly.  I am looking only at him, but the girl makes a noise of obvious disgust.  Like she can’t believe I think that he wants anything to do with me.

“Nothing,” he answers evenly.

“Then stop looking at me like that,” I spit out between clenched teeth.

His mouth twitches in response, but he says nothing.  I start to walk away.

“Not everyone is out to get you, you know, Isolde.”  I stop short, whipping around to face him again.  The girl is glaring at me, since she obviously didn’t know that he knew my name.

“What?” I hiss.

He smiles, which makes me madder.  “Nothing.”  He shrugs.  “I just thought you should know that it’s not just you against the world.”

I glare at him.  But my hair is standing on end.

He knows my real name.

I decide not to waste any more time on him as I stalk out of the cafeteria, leaving my half empty tray sitting in front of him at the table.

* * * * *

If you were to look at me, and then look at him, it’s pretty easy to see that we are not friends.  He often wears boat shoes and polos and looks like he just stepped off of a yacht.  I’m much more likely to be caught in ripped skinny jeans tucked into worn out boots.  My nose and eyebrow have metal posts through them, and even more rings line my ears.  My hair is a mousy brown color that I cut short and choppy.  And he looks like he’s about to tie a sweater around his shoulders and board a boat destined for Cape Cod.

Nevertheless, he is waiting for me outside the door when I leave English the next day.  I brush past him, but he grabs my arm, forcing me to turn.

“Can I talk to you?” he asks.

“Why?” I ask, loudly.  “Your girlfriend won’t like it.”

He chuckles.  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

I sigh, annoyed.  “What do you want?” I ask again, quieter.

He opens his mouth as though he’s going to say something, and then stops.

“Just come with me,” he asks, almost pleading.  I can’t really say no.

“Fine,” I respond, feeling defeated.

He takes my hand and leads me to the stairs.  We climb and we climb, until I know we’re at the landing to the top floor of the building.  But he turns and goes up another flight of stairs.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Somewhere we can talk,” he answers, squeezing my hand.  It is then that I feel them.  The bolts of electricity that pulse back and forth between our palms. 

Then he’s yanking on a door and pulling me into darkness.

He finds the cord that turns on the bare light bulb and pulls on it.  Light bathes the room, and I see that it’s a storage room.  We sit on an old loveseat together, mostly because he won’t let go of my hand.  It tingles, as if the current between us is palpable.

“Isolde,” he says.  I flinch, averting my eyes.

“Don’t call me that,” I say, shaking my head.

“Why?”

“I thought you had something to tell me,” I look at him pointedly, trying to change the topic.

“Why can’t I call you by your name?” he asks again.  I sigh.

Now that I look at his face, I can see why he’s always the center of a crowd.  His eyes are the brightest blue I’ve ever seen, like the sky on a sunny summer day.  His eyelashes are long and blond, the same golden color as his shaggy hair.  He’s beautiful.  It renders me momentarily speechless.

“I changed it,” I say, barely above a whisper. 

“To what?”

“Izzy.”

“Why?”

I shake my head.  “There’s too much tragedy in that name.”  I say it before I can catch myself.  I turn away from him.  “Can I go?”  I am distinctly uncomfortable.

“Izzy…”  The soft tone of his voice makes me turn back to him.  And when he kisses me, it takes me completely by surprise.

“What are you doing?” I hiss, backing away from him.  He still has a grip on my hand, so I can’t get very far.

He shakes his head.  “I’m sorry.”  His eyes are so sad.  So defeated.  “I don’t know why I did that.”

I sigh again.  “What do you want, Connor?”

His head snaps up again.  “You know my name?”

I let out a strangled laugh.  I can’t believe his question.  “You’ve been stalking me for the last week.  I looked you up.”

“Oh,” he says, sounding relieved.  “That’s all…”

My brow furrows.  What does he mean?  What’s all?  Is there more?

“Please tell me why I’m here.  I have other things to do,” I whisper, because I’m getting creeped out and I want to get as far away from him as possible.

“I know who you are,” he says quietly.

I’m glad his blue eyes aren’t trained on me.  I think my resolve would weaken even more.

“Oh, really?  Then who am I?”

He fixes those eyes on me again, and I’m frozen, captivated by his mouth as it tells me the things I’ve been hiding from everybody since I ran away from home all those years ago.

“You are Isolde O’Rourke.  Only daughter of Patrick and Cecelia O’Rourke.  After your father’s imprisonment, your mother was sent to a mental hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota.  You ran away, took her maiden name, and lived with foster parents in Boulder until you came here.”  He pauses, as if sizing me up.  “I didn’t know you legally changed your first name, though.”

I am staring at him, still as a stone.  A tear rolls down my cheek, and he gently wipes it away with the pad of his thumb.  I let him.

“How?”  It’s all I can get out.

“My mom was Jane Vander Gras.”

I can feel the blood drain from my face.  My extremities go cold.  I’ve been running from this for so long, but it caught me.  The tears are flowing freely now as I blink. 

“Why did you bring me here?”  I barely choke out the question.  I have a sudden and intense pang of fear.  Fear for my life.  Fear for my future, for my own sanity.

His lips turn up in a half smile.  A sad smile.  “I knew you were out there.  Initially, I wanted… vengeance.  I wanted you to pay for what happened to my mother.  It was hard to find you, since you dumped the scumbag’s name.”  His tone has a hard edge to it, and I can hardly look him in the eye.  “Our lawyer found you.  And you were here.  In the same place my dad and I sought refuge after the hell we went through at the trial.  In the clean air of the mountains, where you see how small you are.”  He pauses again, forcing me to meet his eyes.  Those sad, beautiful, blue eyes.  “And then I saw you.  You radiated your pain, wore it on your sleeve.  You’ve been running, too.”

My brow knits together, and he looks at our hands.

“I’ve been following you for two years, trying to get up the nerve to have this conversation with you.  And after all this time, you came to me first.”

We sit in silence until I can find my voice again.  “But your last name is different,” I whisper.  I had no idea who he was.

“James,” he answers softly.  “My mom didn’t take my dad’s name when they married.”

I shake my head, confused.  “Why did you bring me here?” I whisper again.  I can’t stop the tears from falling.  I don’t want to hurt anymore.

“Because in following you, I fell in love with you.”

His words are simple, but they have a distinct effect on me.  I yank my hand out of his grasp and stumble into the corner of the room.  Curling up into a ball on the floor, I sob.

Love is what did this to my family.  Because of what my dad chose to love.  And because my mom loved my dad. 

“Izzy…” Connor says softly.  He hasn’t left the loveseat, but he’s watching me.

“You can’t love me,” I choke out between sobs.  “You don’t know what’s inside me.”

“You’re not your parents, Izzy.”  The words are familiar, spoken to me once a week at my psychologist’s office.  But they have never sunk in.

“You don’t know that,” I respond.

“Yes, I do.  I’ve been watching you, remember?  You’re kind.  You keep to yourself.  You care about people.”  He slowly eases himself onto the floor and scoots toward me.  When he lifts my head onto his lap, I don’t object.

“You can’t love me,” I say again, my voice sounding impossibly small.  “Your family would hate you.”

“My dad already knows.”

This brings me enough out of my reverie to look him in the eyes again.

“Your dad?”

“I told him that I found you two years ago.  He told me to keep my distance, that I shouldn’t take out my anger on you.  But I just… couldn’t.  I couldn’t stay away.  Every time I saw you, I wanted to touch you, to feel you next to me.  My anger disappeared.  And then I just wanted… you.”

I sit up to look at him.  This is a lot to process. 

Love is not something I have ever been looking for.  I had vowed to never repeat my parents’ mistakes.  I don’t know what to tell him.

“You can have anyone,” I say simply, quietly.  “Why me?”

His bright blue eyes meet mine.  He shakes his head.

“You can’t tell me that you don’t see how they all look at you.  All the other girls.  Like the one at dinner yesterday, for instance?”

He gives me a wry smile.  “Someone was watching me, too, I take it?”

I elbow him in the ribs and he laughs.  The sound fills the room and makes me smile.

He shakes his head again.  “Those girls… they don’t know pain.  The worst pain they’ve ever felt is a bad hangover.”  He takes my hand in his.  “I can see your pain in the way you carry yourself.  We’re alike in that way.  There are things that the rest of the world will never feel, but we have already felt them.”

“But what if I am like my parents?  What if that madness is in my blood?” I whisper the words out of fear, the fear that I have been carrying with me for almost ten years.

“You won’t be.  I would never let you.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh.  He sounds so crazy.  “I don’t know you.  You make it sound like we have a future together.”

“Maybe we do.”  He is so sincere that I find myself looking into his eyes again.

And when he leans in to kiss me again, I meet him halfway.

I wasn’t looking for a future.  I was just looking to escape my past. 

And maybe, with Connor, I have a shot at both.

freight trains and bug bites.

45.  keep on dreaming, even if it breaks your heart.

"oh, you hit me harder than a freight train.

right in the middle of my membrane.

driving backwards in the fast lane.

headlights off after midnight.

i saw you shining in the starlight.

oh, you got me like a bug bite.

and now you're under my skin."

-casey abrams

i am tired.  my tension headaches have returned.  i'm feeling isolated, like it's me against the world.  but i'm excited.

why?

i'm sitting here, on the couch on our front porch.  my computer is on my lap.  there is a wicker table cutting into the backs of my calves, leaving imprints.  on the table are an assortment of items.  i have been accumulating things out here for the last several days.

there is a weekly planner.  two notebooks.  a black pen and a pink pen.  three yearly calendars, from 2012, 2013, and 2014.  a small box of gre vocabulary flashcards.  and a general psychology textbook.

what does this mean?

it means i've been planning.

since i left grad school in january, i have been trying to pinpoint what i want to do with my life.  i often say that flippantly, but i have been trying very hard to get serious about it.  i need some direction.  a lot has changed in my life since january.  i started a job and ended it, because i was miserable.  i have visited friends all over the country.  i went on a road trip in a maroon gmc safari with four friends.  i've spent a lot of time searching.  but it's hard to search when you don't know what you're looking for.

but there has been something that has been nudging me since way back in february.  i thought i knew what it was getting at - i thought forensic psychology would be pretty cool.  i'm fascinated by forensic science.  but all of the law jargon, the court cases, the fact that i would have to meet with people who potentially killed or raped or injured others... i couldn't handle that.  i put it on the shelf.

then i toyed with reading and writing, two things i have loved for as long as i can remember.  my favorite stories have to do with love, obviously.  i'm a sucker for a good love story.  so when i'm writing, i always write about love, about two people meeting and falling for each other, about whirlwinds and problems and sparks flying all over the place.  i can get into characters' heads.  that's what i love, and what i'm good at.  however, the practicality of an english or creative writing degree doesn't seem very high.  i'd have to teach, since the odds of making a living off of published works isn't high either.  so i put that on the shelf, too.  i figure, i don't need a degree to write.  i can do that anyways.

so then i started looking into counseling.  that seemed like it could be a good fit.  i'd be helping people.  and i love college campuses, so i thought, why not try to do higher education counseling?  and then i thought about some of the issues i saw while i was in college - the stuff that the counseling center had to deal with.  suicide attempts.  rape.  eating disorders.  depression.  anxiety.  the list goes on.  higher ed counseling is a lifeline.  sometimes a last hope.  i want to help people, i do.  but i just don't think i have the mental and emotional strength to be someone's last hope.  i would blame myself every time.  plus, i saw a counselor during my senior year of college.  and i lied to him.  repeatedly.  i just... i don't think it was the right path for me.

that's when it hit me.  just like a freight train, as the song at the beginning of the post suggests.  i don't know why it took me so long to figure this one out.  it was all right in front of me all along.  that's called hindsight bias, by the way.  it's the feeling you get after something happens that you saw it coming all along.  i learned that by reading my psychology textbook.

falling in love fascinates me.  i've always thought it was because it is something i want and am looking for, and that's why i always write about it.  but think about this.  why are you attracted to some people and not to others?  what is this "spark" that people say needs to be there?  chemistry, sure, but what causes it?  how can you be friends with some people for years without any stronger feelings, but other times you "fall for" your friend?  can men and women just be friends?  is there such a thing as love at first sight?  can lust and physical attraction truly turn into love?  SO MANY QUESTIONS.

there is a field of research within social psychology about interpersonal relationships.  ever since i found it, it's all i can think about.  it's like a bug bite.  even when you don't think you're thinking about it, it will suddenly itch, and then it's all you can think about.  i want to answer those questions.  there are probably already answers to some of them.  but i want more.

since i have realized this, i've been working like mad to put all of my jumbled thoughts into action.  i have to take the gre general test again and get a higher score.  i have to take the psychology subject exam.  i have to earn at least 24 credits in psychology, and i currently have only 6 credits from hope.  plus, i just got a new job that i start on monday, and i'm looking for an apartment in the city where my job is, so that i won't waste time driving.  i have a lot on my plate.  but at night, after scrambling around all day trying to figure all of this stuff out, i open my 9th edition of david myer's "psychology," and i'm lost in this other world, this world where things like interpersonal relationship research and hindsight bias are everyday terms.  i haven't been this excited about learning since the first time i drew a benzene ring back in high school.  this is where i want my life to go.

"some dreams stay with you forever.

drag you around and bring you back to where you were.

some dreams keep on getting better.

you've got to keep believing if you want to know for sure."

- eli young band

a love letter

to whom it may concern:

there are some things in life that i just don't understand.

i've used this blog to talk about feelings and relationships in the past.  it was a coping mechanism, a way for me work through the emotions i was having.  i haven't written about either of those topics in quite some time, and i wasn't planning on ever doing so again.  however... something has been nagging at me, tugging at my brain.

i know what love looks like.  my parents have been married for almost 28 years and are so incredibly happy.  my aunt and uncle call each other "the love of my life."  both of my sets of grandparents have been married for 50+ years.  i've been in two of my friends' weddings, and have two more coming up in the next year.  i've been helping people plan weddings pretty consistently for the last two years.  and i recently spent two weeks with a couple who know each other completely inside and out, a comfort that i rarely see in anyone.  i know what love looks like.  that is not the question here.

i might know what love looks like... but how do people find it in the first place?

i have had some struggles with my self-esteem in the past.  i know this about myself - sometimes i just get down.  i feel like there are things wrong with me, inherent flaws that drive people away.  with the love of some really good friends, i am beginning to see that i don't need to worry so much about this.  my confidence has never been better than it is right now.  but that still begs the question of this post, doesn't it?

why am i still single?

there are things about me that make guys cringe, i know.  i read cosmo religiously.  i rarely miss the bachelor or the bachelorette.  i get lazy about shaving my legs.  things like that.  but there are so many things about me that i have been told guys love.  i can talk baseball and hockey in more detail than a lot of people.  i'd rather be outside than anywhere else.  i'm more comfortable in hiking shoes than heels, and love wearing ball caps.  i laugh at myself all the time.  i'm a generally happy person.  i don't think it's that people don't like me.  i just don't know what i'm doing, out in the real world.

i know a lot of people who found the love of their lives in high school.  sweet.  more power to you.

i know even more people who marry their college sweethearts.  awesome.  go you.

but what happens after college?  what happens when there are no more classes or organized activities that force people who are automatically connected by this one common thing together?  what then?

the semester i spent in grad school showed me that intellectuals are boring.  no, i don't want to talk about your research for the next five hours, thank you very much.

the stint i did in online dating proved that people can be compatible on paper and not in life.  oh, you want to start growing bonzai trees?  your job is to drink beer?  you're in med school and think the phrase "textually active" is legit?  no.  just... no.  check, please.

the one guy i met at work seemed to be the most promising.  but then when things didn't work out, i still had to see him at work.  and that... sucked.

now that i'm home, i've realized that i already know everyone my age in this town.  the bars here are full of washed up people i went to high school with.  and, no, i don't want to talk to you about how you used to play the cello back in 7th grade.  remember that?  i don't care.

so what am i supposed to do?  where am i supposed to meet people?

there is a plan for me.  i just haven't met the one yet.  the timing isn't right.  i've heard them all.  and you know what?  none of that makes me feel better.  i still feel like the girl who finally got out of this town, and then failed to make it out in the world, so she had to come back.  all of my best friends are getting married.  i want that.  i want to know that someone has chosen me.  just me.  that someone wants to spend their life with me and no one else.  i can't see it right now, when i look into the future.  that's what scares me.

i can take care of myself.  that's the thing!  i don't want to have to all the time.  i want someone to have my back.

anytime now would be great to reveal yourself.  i mean, i'm cool with hanging out, being friends, whatever.  but i'm kind of over it.  i have enough friends.  i want someone to want more.

and someone who preferably wouldn't mind moving west in the future.  say, to the mountains, maybe?  that's where my heart is, after all.  but i guess i'll take what i can get for the time being.

yours, patiently waiting.  or maybe impatiently waiting.

amanda