Ivory Angel #1

Something borrowed, something new, something sappy, something true

I have a confession to make: I have never been in love.

Or at least, I presume I haven’t. I mean, how do you really know? Well, except for chocolate. I can honestly say I LOVE chocolate. Love it with a heart that has a squiggly arrow in it because that’s soooo much more passionate. Or so I’ve been told.

My parents got married when they were my age, when my dad got down on his knees and proposed to my mother after three dates and she accepted a month later. My best friend is engaged to be married in the fall, five of my high school classmates just got married in the last year alone and here I sit, alone at a pasta place pleasantly ignored by couples who gush every single cuddly-wuddly, insipid, putrifying little name at each other’s necklines and it PISSES ME off because I don’t have it and I want it. Now. If a djinn levitated up to me and told me I could have love but only if my best friend never felt it again, I’d probably have to think about it a little. And that soooo doesn’t make me feel good.

I don’t know why I haven’t been in love, haven’t been worthy of being loved. I think I’m a good person, schemes to become an evil dictatoress notwithstanding. But it’s such a disappointment. And it hits me in the gut when I see good people in good relationships because you’re supposed to be happy for someone and you say you’re happy for someone and you want to be happy for someone but all you can do is sit there and seethe/smile with this vinyl look on your face which is so sticky with the sweat and tears of nights of jealousy of bed-hopping of waiting of RENUNCIATING of screaming you’ll never even try not try again not look for it again because you’re too damn good always too damn good for anybody whose eyes keep passing you over because you’re not blond enough or tan enough and you would fucking rather talk about Foucault than do whatever it is they do at waxing parties that is somehow going to make you be warm and fuzzy to the other gender and GET ME A FUCKING VODKA YOU FEEBLE-WITTED MAN-WHORE!

It may be I’ve just given up. Like I had a heart once and it collapsed. Black hole. Frostbitten lump of coal. It’s the color of three-month old sushi and the size of a withered eyeball’s sole. Maybe it was C., the boy who told me he loved me and told me he was a member of the Mafia and told me he still wanted to take me home to meet his mother even after I said I was a one-hundred and eighty-year-old being from the planet Zoxuma two days before he was kicked out of school for threatening some guy with a handmade shank. Or maybe it was J., the boy who tossed me flowers from a balcony on stage and was kicked out of school for having a list of people he was going to kill with his father’s gun and I know I was on it. Or maybe it was B., the boy who read my poetry, I mean the stuff I don’t show to anyone, and he told me I had a beautiful soul before he slammed some boy up-side the head with his Guns & Roses skateboard for dissin’ his mother. I hear he still talks about me. I think he’s on parole now.

AHA! Watson, I think I spies me a pattern! Could it be that you subconsciously question your own self-worth and think that you don’t deserve a sane, loving human being? Maybe your ego needs someone around you who’s crazier so it feels all superior and contented-like? Maybe you’re so afraid of being rejected the only guys you can go out with are the ones who are psychotic because that makes them dependent on you? Maybe the universe is telling you that this whole relationship-gig thing IS SO not for you little girl because don’t play with fire until you are ready and willing to be burned!

***

So… I met this guy two weeks ago, let’s call him Derrick, and he seems really nice and sweet and everything, though he’s cuter in the dark. Not that looks matter too much to me. A week ago, we had our second date. He took me to a choir concert, you know- classical music the works. So sophisticated. And blond. And yet he can sit on my couch and snort up ketchup watching South Park. He has a mini-Klingon batliff on his shelf next to his collection of anime and his shoebox full of video games for a dusty Super Nintendo. You know us nerds should get together and propagate and eventually rule the earth. Oh, wait…

So I want to keep dating and I want to keep hoping, but I think I have more love with this dream than with the guy himself, love with some hope that if I throw myself at some guy hard enough, eventually something will turn out to be real. The thing is, it isn’t fair to Derrick, you know. I’d be committing intimate perjury. He seems so delicate and shy and nervous and so afraid and… I just don’t want to hurt him the way I’ve been hurt. But then again, it would be nice to do something beyond hopping out in and out of bed-sheets at parties with guys who don’t give a fuck about me or, more precisely, don’t give anything beyond a fuck about me, and sweep me under the rug the next morning can’t say hi or look me in the eyes again because they’re ashamed of breaking my tender, female heart. Sorry pal, but it wasn’t that great. They make me laugh a little, because I used them just as much and they don’t even know it.

So no matter how many times I see soft irises angling in the moonlight or feel the pulse of a tango dancer beating crimson against my neck, I just know that it’s not going to work. That I can write all the trite, overdramatic utterances I want in my oh-so-saccharine yet acerbic tones and pretend that I don’t really care about men…but who am I fooling? I want Derrick to raise me up out of the muck, raise me up like Lazarus, holding my hand and walking me to where the lily-pads wait to be waltzed on, water smooth as sapphire where he puts me in a silver dress and NEVER EVEN FLINCHES WHEN HE SEES THAT I AM STILL COVERED WITH THE SHIT I’VE BEEN BURIED IN.

But it wouldn’t be fair to him. To continue this charade. Because while I can hold his hands and hold his lips I’d always be on the verge of stepping back, waiting for him to try and lick my earlobe with a blowtorch. I just can’t let him build a dream on the shoulders of somebody who isn’t even there.