Reflection and Smurf Food

I’m such a school girl. And also a china doll, a foul creature, a space cadet, a stoic spider, a passionate geyser, a clever dirty-mouth, a slurring drunk, a sleepwalker, a meticulous grandmother, a corny uncle, a scatterbrain felt-tip.

I just got a call my Irish boyfriend with whom I’ve developed a dialogue so much so that I suppose I can drop the pretend-talk because he’s real now. He asked about my dog bite, and about Mark’s knee. Turns out he too had ACL reconstruction in the past year.

All my life I have conjured this type of fantasy relationship in which I find great pleasure. Then the fantasy becomes real, loses magic. Rather, loses cloud-magic, magic not attached to anything tangible, but gains tactile magic. The tactile then gains complexity. Here are two examples:

1. Vampire Boy College, he dressed in all black, including a trench coat and purple-lens glasses, in darkness and in light. He had an odor, something like an enduring accumulation of multiple bodies and death. It was pungent and unmistakable. I wrote stories about him. I encountered him everywhere. Everywhere. Often at Discount Den where every day I bought at least one 44 oz. fountain soda (either Diet Mountain Dew or a mix of a few). The kicker was the day I came back from Christmas break. I came back early because relations with my mom were terrible and I couldn't bear being there. Nobody was on campus. Nobody. I set off to enjoy a solitary, peaceful walk in the cold and snow, and out from behind a tree came this dark, purple-eyed figure. I think I jumped. Within a month I met a tweaky fellow who later became my even tweakier roommate, who not only introduced me to Vampire Boy but also told him that I had been calling him Vampire Boy and writing stories about him. His voice was nothing like I imagined, average-nasal, not deep and gothy. He was very intelligent, and also self-righteously straight-edge. I was too, when I met him. He began to shift away when the acid streamed into the group.

2. Brian (this is also the name of my Irish chum): We were in the same core curriculum biology class in college, which by the end of the semester almost nobody came to because our professor, a pompous fellow named Aristotle, chose to talk more about his relationships with elite scientists than what we were supposed to be learning about biology. He even showed us a video of a decaying gray biologist, who had been his teacher, walking down an aisle to accept some award. Anyway, I had noticed this Brian walking around campus. I liked the way he walked with his backpack and held onto the bottom of his shirt sleeves. I began writing stories about him, at least one of which I was asked to read out loud in my fiction class. Red face. At the beginning of the semester this Brian sat in the front of the room and toward the left, asked questions, the whole bit. I sat in the back right-hand corner as always, so I could keep tabs on everything. Week by week I noticed us noticing each other; week by week he moved closer to the back right-hand part of the room. Eventually he sat in the row ahead of me and we began talking. Soon we began hanging out, and then dating and kissing and such. We had a fun, kid, Candyland kind of relationship. Once we drove to a cemetery in the middle of the night, then my car wouldn’t start to get us out of there; another cemetery trip, a cop approached, disrupted our nap, and told us to leave. Jerk. Once we took a long walk and the sky dumped niagra-rain; we sat under the awning of a building for hours waiting for it to stop. Things began to change. I was very consistently depressed at this point in my life. It wasn’t something I made a big deal of, or needed to talk about; it was just fact. However, he always talked about it, asked me about it, spotlit it like it didn’t need to be. Sometimes his tales of rampant drunkenness at his trippy party house bored me, though his tales of colorful and sometimes spiritually-flecked drug use intrigued me. He dressed as Rasta Smurf the Halloween we were together. We talked books and music and drank coffee. For Christmas we went to our respective homes and on his way back to Carbondale—he lived near Chicago—he stopped in Effingham and stayed the night. Things continued to change. I developed a crush on someone else, and he told me every time we talked that his friends thought he should get rid of me. I decided, then, that we should part ways. He began calling and begging and following me around campus and to parties, and in the same sentence calling me a bitch and telling me he loved me. I actively avoided him after that, with cold-bitch stoicism. Eventually I felt bad for cutting him off so entirely as if he never existed. I’d like to be able to tell him. That period is so encapsulated unto itself it seems like just a story. I have no idea what Brian's last name is.

I don't think I capture people solely for story-food and fantasy like I did then. Then I had no skills talking to people, none, nihil, zip. I was in a glass tower. Instead I had vast relationships in my head to compensate. Those stories still go on, but now there is better balance between the relationships inside my head and the relationships outside my head, though probably you all are just stories anyway.