I haven't written any cam in a long time. This needs to be fixed.
Also, just a couple of author's notes. This is kinda.. I dunno, darker than I normally write. It takes place in New York, and it's based a lot off of what's happening to me right now, with a few changes to make it fit Sam. The conversations in the first half of this are, pretty much word-for-word, conversations I've had before. Weird coincidence: Carly in this story is based a lot off of a girl named Sam that I know.
--
So I stopped throwing up again. Except I didn't cave or fall apart like I usually do, and it's been almost a week and a half. I started drinking again, but it's not like the way I used to, where I'd be drunk pretty much every day. It's just a glass or four of wine a day, which I suppose is still pretty bad, but it's better. Better is good. It's not as good as not drinking for ten months, but it's still good. Right?
Bulimia sucks, to put it bluntly.
Sam Puckett, bulimic. I know, not really what you'd expect, right? I mean, I'm me. I'm a total tomboy and I eat whatever I want and why would I give a fuck about my weight when I've never been fat or anything?
Ask somebody else, because I honestly don't know. It just sort of happened.
The whole eating disorders thing sucks in general. I would know. I've cycled through a couple of them for the last three years.
God, I can't believe it's been three years. Three fucking years.
I mean, it hasn't been three solid years. It's been more of an on and off kind of thing, like what smoking was, up until recently. It started the summer after sixth grade. Yes, sixth grade. I never made myself throw up then. It started as some bullshit diet after some girl I was friends with before I came out put some shit in my head about how I was a fat ugly dyke. And I suppose her obsession with what she ate, when she was tall and skinny and freaking gorgeous didn't help. This isn't my self esteem speaking, this is common sense: I wasn't pretty. At all. And if a girl that looked like she did had to be as obsessed with calories as she was, shouldn't I be too?
The result? Months of anorexia. I never really though of it like that at the time, but when I look back, it's like, dear fucking god, how did I not starve to death? I lived off carrots and salads and skipped lunch and breakfast and most of the time, dinner. I lost something like 30 pounds in the space of six weeks.
You'd never guess, right? I love food. I'm not a stick or anything. I'm Sam, for chrissake. Sam just doesn't do eating disorders, right? Wrong.
I switched to anorexia with purging in October 2007. If I ate too much salad or, god forbid, a piece of bread, it was straight to a toilet and a toothbrush down my throat.
Blah blah blah story of my life. Like anybody really gives a fuck. But whatever, I guess it should be told. Just so my fucked up thought process and the fact that at ninty five pounds, I feel horribly fat makes a little bit more sense. Or something resembling sense.
By the second half of seventh grade, I was better, for the most part. It stayed that way for few months, floating on this cloud of bliss where people didn't stick their toothbrush down their throat to feel better about themselves. I mean, I was on probation by summer for truancy or whatever shit reason they gave, after what must have been a dozen CPS cases throughout the school year. I was good at putting on a happy face and saying nothing was wrong for all the social workers, and they'd close the case, and then it seemed like it was only a week later, another one would get opened.
Eighth grade rolled around, and with it came Liz, who was the first openly bisexual girl I'd ever met. So, naturally I'd be completely wrapped up in her. She wasn't horribly ugly or anything, and she was actually really fun. She reminded me a lot of myself, actually, and now that I look back, I suppose I should have taken that as my sign to turn and start running as fast as I could.
But I was bi. She was bi. She liked me. I liked her. We got along. I just ignored all the bad things, like the bottles of rum she carried around with her and dispersed at my slightest request.
That was the beginning of my alcoholism. Yeah, I know, it's pathetic. Alcoholic at thirteen. Thirteen and fourteen. And you might think I'm kidding when I say that I was, and am, now that I think about it, an alcoholic. That I'm exaggerating, that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I was. How else could you explain the fact that I was drunk four or five days out of the week, that I would go into stores and steal twelve packs and if I had nobody to drink them with, I'd sit alone in the graveyard and drink them by myself? What about the things I starting seeing and hearing in the end of June, when I told myself that enough was enough and just drop dead stopped. Four days walking around in some god awful stupor, ignoring the voices and the images of people and bottles of alcohol that I knew weren't really there.
I went to three hospitals in the space of two months. None of them did shit for me, except give me a connection to cocaine and any type of prescription pills I wanted.
All I can say is thank god I never saw the girl enough that I was able to get addicted to crack. God knows where I would be right now if I had been, considering what alcohol did to me.
I'm practically telling my life story, I know. Bare with me here, there isn't much more, I promise.
So when I was thirteen, I was raped by my best friend's boyfriend. The guy must have told me, because rumors started flying around, and god knows I would never tell anybody. And when the guy's boyfriend, who I thought was my friend, heard, did he freak out and dump the guy? Did he hug me and tell me he was so sorry and whatever the hell you're supposed to tell people who get raped? Nope.
Our conversation went something along the lines of, "So I heard that Jeffrey raped you or some bullshit?"
Terrified by the fact that somebody knew about that, I'd looked at the ground, at the parking lot next to the starbucks we were standing outside of, anywhere but at his face, and mumbled a charismatic and indifferent, "Uhm."
He'd continued, "Because I think that's bullshit. You're too much of a whore for it to ever be rape with you. You're like, un-rapeable," He'd said this with a smile, trying to show he was joking or something, but I felt like I'd been slapped. It felt like he'd taken my stomach and twisted it around and tugged it out through my throat. And I know I'd made my share of bad choices and slept with my fair share of the wrong people, but honestly?
It was horrible, and I knew at the time that it was so wrong and I knew what happened to me, but the idea wedged itself into my head that he was right. That I must have wanted it, or I would've done more than push him away and tell him I didn't want to. That if I really hadn't wanted it, I would've stopped him. That I could've pushed him off, even when he weighed a good 50 pounds more than I did, when he'd pushed me onto the ground and kept me pinned there.
Pure, absolute bulimia came around a few months later. No more starving myself, just plain old throwing up after every meal. The anxiety attacks came back, my unmedicated bipolar disorder (that I'm starting to think is really misdiagnosed borderline personality) began to tear apart my life. And, even at ten months sober, I starting pouring myself glasses of wine and smoking a pack of cigarettes at a time to control them. And you'd think, just deal with the fucking panic attacks, you know that they pass you by eventually. All ten a day of them. They go away, why the hell would you start smoking? That's what you're thinking right now, isn't it?
Well I'd had enough. And considering my bulimia, my anorexia, and god knows what else I've done to myself, it should be kind of obvious that my health doesn't come before feeling okay right now.
It went on for a few months, until finally Carly, my best friend since god knows when, the girl who stuck with me through everything, even as I shed my good, normal friends for party friends, who passed me by when I stopped drinking, realized that I wasn't okay. That there was something more than the fact that I'd started chain smoking like there was no tomorrow.
That, and the fact that she found me passed out next to a toilet filled with blood and puke in my apartment.
You're probably wondering why I do this to myself, right? Why, whenever happiness is handed to me, I always sit here and sabotage myself and I let myself fall apart. It happens every year, like clockwork. February, things are a bit off, March I accept that I'm absolutely not okay, April it just gets worse, May I hit an all time low (lower and lower every year) and by July I start getting better, but I can never really say that I'm truly okay until late autumn. And you ask, if I have that all figured out, then why don't I just stop myself.
I've been so sad for so long that I don't really know how to do anything else.
--
That was a nice lovely wall of complete and utter self pity earlier, wasn't it? I think it was.
I'm laying here in my bed, cigarette dangling from my lips as my eyelids drift open and shut, my laptop sitting on my lap and blaring music at me. My ashtray's just barely touching my knee, and it's practically overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes and an old lighter that ran out of lighter fluid.
I don't know if it's like this for anybody else, but I know that for me, a huge part of what keeps me smoking is the mini high I start to build up after half my first cigarette. It just builds higher and high with every drag, every cigarette, until I'm in a place where I don't have to think anymore. The addiction is secondary.
A week and a half. I can't believe it. I actually made it a whole week and a half.
The funny thing is that I've actually started losing weight since I stopped. I guess that thing I read about throwing up only being able to get up to 60% of the calories you consumed out is completely right.
Huh. The internet doesn't lie.
I feel like such an emo kid. Or something. I don't know. I don't mean to wallow in self pity, it just sort of.. happens, you know? When I'm alone too long, I just sit here and think and smoke and I drive myself into this place where I'm so sad that I don't really even know how to function properly.
I feel my phone vibrating beside my foot. Thank god. I need company, even if it's just a voice talking through the static of horrible cell reception. Hell, even if it's a salesperson, I'll sit here and talk to them.
I'm pulling myself up and my fingers are on my still vibrating phone. Carly.
Hey. Better than a salesperson. Better than anybody else who could've called, actually.
"What's up?" I say as I flip open my phone and hit speaker.
Carly and me have a really weird friendship. Actually, no, we don't have a weird friendship. We're best friends. The end. Let me rephrase that: We have a weird history. Made even weirder by the fact that we're still best friends.
So you know that whole thing in girl world or whatever where you absolutely positively do not date your friends' exes? Yeah, that rule is just gone when you're a lesbian. You tend to be encouraged by your friends to date their exes, actually. Which might not make any sense at all to a straight girl, which is why me and Carly are weird. Well, point A of why we're weird, actually. Except point A doesn't really make much sense without point B, which should actually be point A. Point B/A being that me and Carly went out.
Not like a stupid little passtime relationship either. At least, it wasn't for me. Maybe it was for her, but she sure as hell didn't act like it. Like, sex and "I'm in love with you"'s and everything. It's kind of dumb, but I always felt guilty that I was her first but she was most definitely my first. She wasn't even my tenth.
She was the first one I ever loved though. Everybody else was just drunk hookups or sex for weed or sex for a bottle of whiskey.
"Oh, my god, Sam, I haven't seen you since I was like, a fetus," She says, and you can tell that she's laughing at herself and how much she sounds like a valley girl.
"Come over," I hang onto the word over, whining and throwing in an exasperated sigh, as though my life is absolutely horrid and miserable and I'm suffering because she isn't here. Which is sort of true. I'm bored out of my fucking mind.
We broke up though. I can't even remember why, at this point, but she moved on and she likes some guy named Robert or something now. For all I care, he could be named HamisamazingandsoisSam and I still wouldn't like the guy.
Yeah. I'm kind of not over her.
"Did you drink today?" She asks. She does this a lot. Every day, actually. She's the first and only person I ever admitted almost everything to. Bulimia, the fact that my drinking actually was a problem, all the fucked up shit that happened when I was a kid, the rape.. everything. There's some things that she doesn't know, that nobody knows, but it's okay. She knows what she needs to know, the things that she can, and actually has helped with, and that's good enough for me. Because, hey, I'm getting better.
At least, I think I am.
"Nope,"
"Throw up?"
"Nope,"
"Cut?" Yeah, I used to be a cutter too. Started six years ago. Yeah, six. I know I'm only fifteen. Yes, I do mean six.
"Nope,"
"Smoke?"
"Carly, you said yourself that you don't care if I smoke,"
"True. I think it's kinda hot," She adds the last part, and I can tell that she's grinning. I don't know how I know these things, I just do, okay?
Oh. Right. Point A/B. I forgot about that. Point A/B being that her and Liz went out. Which should be awkward, right? Since they know each other through me and they're both my exes and everything. But we're lesbians, so it isn't. It's like.. actually, I can't think of anything to compare it to. There aren't any laws or anything that I can think of to compare the weird habits of teenage lesbians to, so it just is. Just go with it.
"Soooo why did you ask?"
"I felt like it,"
"Great," I deadpan.
"But you didn't do anything else? No.. anything?" She means drugs, but the whole thing kind of weirds her out, so she never actually says out loud that I used to have a drug problem. The drug problem being pain killers and xanax and whatever else I would pop handfuls of. I never told her about the coke.
"Carly, I stopped doing that months ago,"
She doesn't say anything for a moment, until finally, "I'll be over in ten minutes,"
Thank god. I'm almost out of cigarettes.
--
"I can't believe your mom lets you smoke in here," She says as she lays down, sprawled across my tiny bed (which is really just a mattress on the floor in the corner of my room), her hands and arms draped lazily over my legs as she leans her head up at the ceiling.
I'm laying pretty much perpendicular to her, taking drags from my last cigarette and tapping the ashes off into my ashtray. I really will dump it out after this one. I will. Honest.
There's this one part of me that doesn't notice a thing she does, that doesn't notice her hands on my legs and how freaking warm they are or they way that I'm pretty sure she's tracing her fingers along one of the more visible scars on my thigh. That's the part of me that's accepted that she's moved on and we're just best friends again. Which is more than most people can hope for after a breakup, but still.
Then there's this other part of me that notices all of. That notices just how gorgeous she looks all the time, even now, when she isn't wearing any makeup and her hair isn't straightened. The part that notices exactly where her hands are and how warm they are and the way it makes me feel as she traces her fingers across my thigh.
I'm kind of crazy, I know.
"Well it's not like she's one of those crazy, 'oh my god my kid smokes' kind of parents. Besides, wouldn't she be kind of a hypocrite if she didn't?"
She sits there for a moment, expressionless, before she shrugs. "I guess,"
The whole awkward silence thing has never really applied to us, I'm reminded yet again as we drift into silence.
"Hey, can I have the rest of that?" She asks, indicating the last half of the cigarette that's been sitting between my fingers for the last minute or so.
I look at it for a moment, then back at her. "You smoke?"
She shrugs again, and then I shrug along with her and pass it to her, watching her put her lips on it and take a deep drag.
When I was younger, I always used to think things like, "Oh my god our lips totally just touched the same thing,". I don't really, anymore, but it crosses my mind as I watch her exhale, the smoke rising up to the ceiling and making its way out the open window.
We sit in silence for another few seconds as she lays there, taking drags, and I watch as she slowly adopts the same expression that I always end up with when I'm starting to ride out the beginning of my nicotine highs.
She smokes it down to the butt, then stabs it in the ashtray and lays there for a moment, her legs resting on top of mine.
"Hey Sam?" Her voice comes out soft, and just a tiny bit hoarse, as she turns and looks over at me. I look back, wondering what ridiculous facial expression I should plaster across my face to make her smile, but nothing comes to mind, and the thought disappears.
"Yeah?"
She doesn't say anything, and for a moment I wonder if maybe she really hadn't said anything at all, until she pulls herself up and lays down beside me, her legs fitting in with mine and an arm draped around my side.
I turn and look at her, but she doesn't say anything else, just cranes her neck up and kisses my cheek.
"I'm glad you're getting better,"
It's simple, but it's more than I've heard from anybody else, so it's even more touching, and I feel my chest tighten for a moment as I look down at her. I blink a couple of times, and the urge to sit here and cry and hug her, the one that flared up so suddenly, dissipates, and we lay here in silence, her fingers intertwining with mine as summer air pours in through the window.
--
So I went to Millerton today. Millerton being this tiny lower middle class town about a hundred miles north of New York City, give or take ten miles. It sits at the very edge of the New York-Massachusettes border, and outside the town, there's half a dozen farms, with their giant fields and tiny, rusted and falling apart houses and machinery and the mountains at the other side. Don't ask me why I love places like that so much, because I can't give you an answer. I just do.
I do things like that a lot. I go to some far off place that nobody's ever heard of and spend the day walking around, lost in my thoughts and whatever song my ipod's playing.
I don't know what it is. I really, honestly don't, but something about the fields and the mountains (large enough to dwarf the Palisades of the lower hudson valley) and how fucking beautiful it all is and how peaceful and the one small road.. god, just everything, it makes me want to lay in that field forever and cry. Just cry until everything's gone, and then I can stand up and look at the mountains and the birds and smile, because I know I'm happy there. That there's something to remind me that I can still be happy.
That isn't really right. I can't even describe it, it's something that just is. Simple as that. Like my seemingly undying love for Carly. There's nothing for me to go on and it makes no sense, and most people would give up, but I'm still sitting here holding on.
Maybe it's just after years of living in Brooklyn and Westchester, where poor means that you buy a used car instead of a brand new BMW every other year. Where everything is just a giant hill and there's houses everywhere and people and the woods and.. god, I don't know. It's not that I don't like Westchester, and it's not like I'd rather live in a village where the average income is $30,000 a year, I just like to get away from it every now and then. And that makes me sound materialistic or something. I'm really not. Honest to god, I'm not. I don't give a fuck about what I have, as long as I have Carly and some running water and a place to sleep, I can manage. It's just nice to live in a nice place and have a bit of extra money. Not that me and my mom are rich or anything, because, god, no. We're the farthest thing from rich that can live in Westchester, but we have a bit of extra money every now and then. We can pay our bills and my mom can make her car payments and the mortgage and everything.
You'll probably think I'm crazy for it, but it takes me something like three or four hours to get to Millerton if I'm lucky. I have to take a train to New York City, transfer at grand central to a train on the Harlem line running to Wasiac, then bike or walk the eleven miles from the Wasiac station to Millerton. It's an hour to the city, and then another two hours from the city to Wasiac.
Don't ask about my obsession with Millerton and upstate New York. I can't explain it. It just is. I didn't even know that Millerton existed until I drove to a ski resort a few miles north of it a couple of months ago. I fell in love with the place just driving through it, and I've come back to sit in the farms around it at least once a month ever since. Once the weather got nicer, anyway.
I like to travel. I think you've kind of figured that out by now. Not "I like to travel," in the way that most people mean it, in that they just like going to Europe or the Bahamas or something. No, I like going anywhere and everywhere. And past that, it's not even where I'm going. I don't give a fuck where I'm going, I just love sitting on trains and busses and watching all these towns and all these people I'd never known existed passing by outside my window.
It's weird, but I like it.
I guess you could say that I like to spend a lot of time on my own. Which is true, for the most part. I couldn't stand being alone all the time, but I'd go even crazier if I had to be around people all the time.
I'm sitting on this tiny little beach on the Hudson River right now, skipping rocks across the surface as the sun dips below the mountains across the river, casting all these weird shadows across the sand and sticks littered across the ground around me, and making all these incredibly, fourth of July worthy colors paint themselves across the sky and the water, interrupted only by the ripples as fish jump and birds skim across the surface.
I lean my face against a log, arms wrapped lazily around it, and smile list-fully as a breeze blows my hair off my face.
Yeah, I need my alone time.
But I'd go crazy if it was always like this.
Without moving my face off the log (shut up, it's really warm) I fish through my bag and pull out a cigarette, lighting it and taking a drag. I sit for another moment, tasting tobacco smoke in my mouth, before I stab it back out in the sand and lay back, staring at the sky as the oranges and reds give way to the stars.
--
Two weeks.
I don't know if I should care how pathetic it is that this is such a big deal for me.
I'm in a field. Not a farm field or anything, because I'm not upstate. I'm home. I'm in Westchester. There's this field that's on this great big hill in my town, and I'm laying in it and Carly's laying next to me, and we've been here for half an hour, eating pieces of bread and gum and apples, smoking cigarettes and talking, and then not talking because some things just don't need to be said.
"You know I'm proud of you, right?" She says, turning over so she's on her side and she's looking at me, her face propped up on her hand.
I smile, and nod, brushing a piece of hair out of her face. It's not really like me, right? That's what you're thinking. That's what most people would think. It's not surprising. I put on this big tough face and this mask for everybody, and I act like nothing touches me. Nothing good, nothing bad. Nothing. I'm just here. I'm just this great big slab of diamond (I was going to say cement, but cement cracks)
Yeah, no. That's not me. That's not me at all. That's just all a fucking play I put on with myself every day of my life when I'm around anybody. Why would they try to hurt me if they didn't think it would work?
She smiles at me, and I smile back, then roll over and stare at the sky as I take another drag from what I'm pretty sure is my eighth, maybe ninth cigarette of the night. I stay like that for a moment, exhaling smoke, before I roll back over and look at her, chewing my lip.
She looks back, and I can feel her breath on my face.
"Do you have any idea how amazing you are?" I mean it. I'm being completely sincere, but I'm not sure if she can tell through the ridiculous grin I've plastered across my face.
What am I talking about? Of course she knows.
If I had any doubt, it's wiped away by the way there's the tiniest blush creeping onto her cheeks, and the way she lays there and opens her mouth, then closes it a couple of times, as though she has no idea what to say. There's a new one. Carly Shay has no idea what to say.
"So how are things going with Robert?" I ask, trying to pull myself back to reality more than anything else. Remind myself that anything resembling a chance with her is long gone, and I just have to accept that and live with it, and learn not to fuck anything up like I always do, because she's all I really have at this point. There's nobody more important than her. Plain and simple. Obsessive and creepy, yes, but true.
"Chase. And I'm over him," She says, smiling at me as her cheek brushes against mine.
Okay. No. Stop. Right now. I wish my mind had an off switch. Life would be so much easier if my mind had an off switch. I'd stop doing stupid fucking things, like all the ones that're racing through my head, involving kissing her and finally, finally admitting that, I'm a little tiny bit, completely not over her yet, and god only knows when I will me.
When I feel her lips against mine, I start beating myself in my head, and attempting to simultaneously come up with an excuse that doesn't involve drugs or alcohol, but nothing comes to mind, and then I start realizing that she's the one with her hand on my head, not the other way around.
So I just lay there and kiss her back as she slowly shifts, until she's hovering over me and my breathing sounds something like a rhino, except sexier and more induced-by-making-out-with-the-girl-I've-been-in-love-with-forever-esque.
God, I don't remember kissing her ever being this amazing.
And then all of a sudden, the feeling's gone and when I open my eyes, she's got this panicked look on her face, even as she leans her forehead against mine, as though I hadn't kissed her back.
Before she says anything, I smile at her and, in a hoarse voice partly from chain smoking but mostly from making out with the most gorgeous girl on the planet, tell her, point blank, "I love you,"
Subtlety isn't really my thing. Not that I really think that it's very important, at this point.
She smiles and then her lips are back against mine, and I'm starting to realize how easy it is to get better as long as I have her.
--
So this took under two hours to write. :o Just btw. I have no idea how I managed that.