Notes: Half-way mark. Thank you to everyone who's been supporting me from the very start, especially to soojinah and starrymilk, for making me think maybe I'm not so crazy for writing this project. This one is a very nostalgic piece inspired, somewhat, by several pieces of literature that have at some point or another touched my life. I keep getting all these ideas and they sort of combine into each other; it's a strange thing to write.
In other news, I now think 'Happiness is a Warm Gun' is probably about shooting up heroine.
I learned the word divorce before I ever knew what love was.
As a child, they tell you love is your father on the sidelines at your junior league baseball game. They say it's your mother's home-cooked dinner, the way your father tucks you in at night and how she kisses your forehead as you fall asleep. They tell you love is a younger brother, his toothless smile, the way he always shares his cookies with you. But you've heard the fighting, seen the sideway glares. You have been in the room and felt the temperature drop ten degrees with one word from your mother, one grunt from your father.
Then your parents split up and the kind woman you now see once a week always tells you, 'she left your father, not you', and that it doesn't mean she no longer loves you. They say 'understand, Yamato, that this has nothing to do with you', and when you say that you don't want to see her again, no-body has the heart to tell you you're wrong.
You think love is coming home to an empty apartment that, on weekends, smells vaguely like old cigarettes. The bed is never made in your father's room and there are no flowers, but there's always money in the kitchen, a credit card "for emergencies only", and his secretary's private number in case you ever need actual adult supervision. You are taught that love is meeting your basic needs for water, food, shelter, an education, superfluous adolescent luxuries. You think of impersonal birthday presents your mother sends, because she no longer knows you but they're always signed: 'love, mum'.
When you're fourteen love is a Christmas cake, your first big concert, the first girl you've ever liked as more than a friend. It is sweaty palms and knotted stomachs and a sense of comraderie, complicity, of holding on tight enough that your knuckles turn white. Confessions, sideway glances, a memory of something you had missed and only just found again.
Love is, you think, a lot of awkward firsts.
Of course, what is true when you are fourteen is rarely true when you're twenty-five. Children remember everything the wrong way. More come after her, though they too, are rare and counted. You think of waves of deep maroon, warm blonde, soft blue, pale violet, dark, dark black but never red, never again red, and they teach you other things, too. That love is warm lips and hot breath and having somewhere to stay. That closed doors and open windows are not necessarily good omens. That soulmates can be friends, too. That whatever or however you desire, does not correlate directly with what you need. It is growing up, and growing out, and falling in and out of pits, somehow finding the courage to go on, climb a new height.
But they never tell you that love, like happiness, is like a warm gun.
You shoot and for a few seconds you're numb and the gun is warm in your hand, tingling fingers still poised over the trigger. It comes suddenly, and unexpected, and unwanted, and that's just the way it usually is. It knocks on your door and beats you to pulp and you're wondering what on heaven's sake happened. And like a shotgun, she is unapologetic, unbridled, untamed, and you are far too deep, far too gone.
She says she believes in laughing stars and that the land of tears is a mysterious place where she can never make a home. She is bright, and warm, and colourful but also she is hard, and too strong, and too afraid of hurting. You see this woman (no; girl), and she looks nothing like the love you remember, is nothing like the love you longed for. But she is kind, and understanding, and demanding in a way no-one has ever been to you. Soft caramel hair, golden eyes, a perfect fucking smile, and before you know it she's crept behind your eyelids, between your fingers, inside the crook of your neck. She is there when you open your eyes, there when you close them, there when you don't want her to be.
And she is more than you've ever asked for, more than you've ever wanted, more than you can handle. She wants you, but also she wants the world, and she wants love, love, love, and you don't know how to give it all to her. She speaks of a future you cannot see, but she is confident she cannot imagine it without you in it. And you take a step back because I never signed up for this. You catch her cooing over someone's wedding band and an alarm goes off in your head because you know what they mean, you know they're shackles, balls and chains, papers that say you will see your child in select holidays only.
You're thinking all this and she looks at you like maybe you're it, like maybe all this time she's been looking for you, like maybe you're magic.
... and it scares you, it absolutely terrifies you that she is something so strange, so beautiful, something you don't know how to love.
Bang, bang.
And maybe, you never want to learn.