school or the pre-real life

on unrequited love

there was a little boy named edward. he had the crush on me, 3rd grade to 6th grade. oscillating between silent grief and gentle forwardness, he did his best to get his feelings through in a dignified but hearty way. there was something about him though, some bad vibe that made me loathe him. and then, who was he to diserve me? and then there was my opera choir of a class, chanting thunderously: "you like him, you like him, you like him!...", to which i, the leading soprano, would trill back: "i hate, hate, hate his guts!...". and they'd have never believed me, had i not proven my indifference through violent denial. more blood, more blood, the public is insatiable. so, on the stage of our collective amateur miniproduction, i made his pre-real life hell. then real life kicked in. and here i am, at almost 20, stepping into young adulthood with a questionably sane choice of men, ever unrequited and miserable, yet ever resisting love in my anhedonia. ever unable to gloam with another. frigid and stiff. resigning to spinsterhood. taming my hormones with half-read books and bitter tea. oh edward, you'd be laughing your ass off.
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on horizons

i'd first known her as ionela. she'd been this quiet, angelic, proper little girl all through primary school. as she underwent a generously transforming puberty, she embraced her other, more womanly name - roxana. a whole new persona. she didn't study much. she didn't think much. she didn't wash much. i do believe she had soap and running water at home. she also had an alcoholic father and a struggling older sister, busy both being an outstanding student and filling in for the mother, who had taken leave along with the oldest sister. but what she most gruesomely had was no survival instinct. so she rarely ever changed her clothes or removed her make-up before redoing it. ew, eww, bloody ewww. we used to walk home together. she used to call herself my friend. i'd burst into devious inner laughter: "friends??! nay, i'm going all the way up outta this manhole, honey." she must have ended up in the gutter. and i betcha g.b. shaw ain't told her 'bout no stars. maybe i could have said something. but you just don't have those kinda talks in the pre-real life.

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on windmills

she never was my true rival, this bianca chick. just the scratcher of my own pathological itch for self-waste on futile drama. her full red lips outshined my thin pale lips, her big brown eyes eclipsed my small green eyes. she had the long hair i yearned to grow and was always denied. indeed, she was the work of the devil. her graceful coyness - hah, wicked pretense. little did i know or care that beyond her neatly ironed dress lay a neatly ironed brain. i, the clumsy untidy sociopathic boyish four-eyed geek, smouldered in tenebrous lonely uncoolness, while she, altered in my donquixotean perception, stood as an evil dame who lived to scheme for my ultimate demolition. fact is, she did get all the attention, all the fun, all the boys i ever laid eyes on in school. i just don't think it was personal. neither was my utter hatred for her. seething over a secretly sworn enemy was just more immediate a thrill than leading my pre-real life as a healthy formative process. and hey, she was only the average beauty queen of junior high - i was meant to triumph in the real life. i'm still waiting. arms crossed.

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on friendship

not much was real in my pre-real life. the trees, grass, skies, rain, snow, food, books, furniture, carpets were. my glasses, my crayons, the ink that stained my fingers when i wrote were. muzzy and the beatles were. the not yet derailed four seasons, my not yet derailed family were. i had happiest, but scarce and most unconstant moments of awarenes. i'd always end up concerned with my share of the map. us kids were all engaged in a war game of unsteady alliances. nothing was amoral, nothing was true. none of us, including myself, knew what the bloody hell earning and cherishing a friend meant. strangely enough, trust and disloyalty never annulled each other, but joined in a symbiosis that made our world go round. side shifters went unpunished. it was primeval commerce. my fellow outcasts and i would contemplate nature and talk of dreams, memories and revelations. of unreal things that felt more real than our pre-real little freak show. good, clean, precious, uplifting, unordinary experiences. and as "the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool" (t.m. almost famous), with our pockets full, we'd then promptly cash in for comfy wet blankets from the cool.

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on wasted youth

boy, did laura hate my guts. so did all the rest, but she was loudest and proudest about it. she wasn't a bad person, she just had the unruly ghetto bitch thing going. oh, las telenovelas she played out. i myself was a conceited weirdo, untameable. well not to her. around 7th grade she thought she'd teach me some respect and literally dragged me into my one and only all-time school cat fight. but it was something else she'd dragged me into earlier that cost me not just a few hairs on my head, but my head itself. 5th grade came to a close with an afternoon dance. i swear i was gonna go home and read. that was me then. but she tugged the hell out of me. she even said it was her treat. anything for a laugh. such kindness i couldn't disregard. so i opened up to a world i'd always dismissed out of prejudice. thalia, ricky martin, azucar moreno! i began to transform. first it was the dance buzz (still got it). then, the hours of schizoid flirtacious anticipation in front of the mirror. then, the taste for bad music. then, the unfulfilled (thank mom) yearning for high heels and make-up. then, the boyfriend monomania. indeed, i was blooming. took me a long hard time to rearrange and catch up. i wonder who i'd be now if not for that wretched evening that blurred my road to real life. so yeah, blame it on laura.