Hey everybody! Keeping on the recent trend of writing for my english class, I have finished part of my second essay. Thought I would post what I had, see what you guys thought! This is a much happier essay than the last one, so hopefully it will be a little easier to read.
“The best way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature”
-Henry Miller
This is not a love story. It may be a story about love, but it is surely not a love story. A love story is what you imagine it to be, it is exactly what we have all grown up knowing. You know the typical archetype: Boy meets girl, Boy falls in love with girl, hopefully girl falls in love with boy, they both live happily ever after. That is the love story we have all seen or heard countless times. This is not one of those stories.
It begins, however, just like any love story, with a meeting. A single insignificant moment that for some reason is forever etched into my memory. This meeting occurred in 8th grade, when a quiet girl that I recognized slightly from one of my classes came up and sat next to me on a bench.I was waiting for my mother to pick me up, she was delaying her walk home. She had extremely curly hair, cut awkwardly short giving it a strangely bouncy quality. She smiled at me through her braces, adorned with green color bands. Her vibrant blue eyes softened as she smiled. Her name was Julia.
I’m not exactly sure when I fell in love with her, but I know when I noticed it. We were basically inseparable throughout the next few years. Then, the summer before our sophomore year in high school, she called me with some bad news. She was moving away. It was then that I realized I couldn’t live without her. I wanted so badly to tell her, but couldn’t. She was dating my best friend. Before I knew it, her going away party arrived. I decided that this was my last opportunity, so I followed the lead of all of those cheesy 80’s romantic comedies and made her a mix tape (times have changed, in reality it was a mix cd, but the idea was the same). She got my message, broke up with my friend, and dated me long distance as she moved. It was short lived, though. Her new house was only an hour or so away, but for two kids without driver’s licenses, we may as well have lived on different planets.
We went a year without talking or seeing each other, which was much too long. When we started talking again, it was toward junior year. She had an upcoming Junior/Senior prom, and asked me if she should say yes to the guy that asked her. I seized the opportunity, telling her no, that she should go with me instead. She resisted at first but, eventually, made the right decision. It was the beginning of a relationship that would last us through our senior year, and into college. Happily ever after, right?
The first year of college was certainly trying, but we made it work. She decided to go to college in New Jersey, I went to a school in Wisconsin. We spent countless hours talking on the phone, video chatting on the computer, etc. Every chance we got to save up the money for a flight home or elsewhere we tried to make sure our connections went through each other’s local airports, where we wold try to have overnight layovers. Everything was going perfectly. We were the “perfect couple”, as many of my friends told me. This was our happily ever after.
. . .
For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed writing. Research papers were never that much of a chore for me, and I preferred essay tests to multiple choice in almost every class. I didn’t quite know why, but it always came naturally to me. I had never thought of writing as a hobby, however.
That all changed, and it began with a dream. I normally didn’t have dreams, and this particular dream was extremely vivid, and took place during a 20 minute power-nap. I cant help but think the all-nighter I had pulled the night prior and the copious amounts of caffeine I needed to complete it had something to do with its vividness. It happened in flashes, three distinct scenes. In the first, I was standing in some sort of ballroom, with people looking at me, waiting for something. I felt scared, alienated, and anxious, so I ran. The next thing I knew i was in a cold damp darkness. A girl was standing opposite from me, just on the fringe of my vision. Her noticeably blue eyes looked right into mine. I closed my eyes. She leaned in and kissed me. I opened my eyes, and suddenly I was looking at a planet, with blue oceans, green land, and puffy white clouds. It rotated slowly beneath me as I floated away from it, until it was completely out of my view. I sat up from my nap, immediately and completely awake, turned to my roommate and simply said “woah” before reaching for the nearest pen and notebook. I then wrote everything I saw. The strangest part about it was just how much I knew. I felt as if not only had I lived those three scenes, but that I had lived in my entire life in this world I had just imagined. Everything had an explanation, and the story that tied the scenes together just made sense.
Once I was done, I immediately called Julia. I just had to tell her about it. She convinced me to write my dream into a novel.
. . .
It all ended so suddenly that I simply did not see it coming. Two weeks prior, I had spent all of my savings to spend spring break with Julia in New York City. Everything went well, and I was even more in love with her than I had ever been. When I had returned back to Wisconsin, I was still on cloud nine, and the euphoria lasted all through the next few weeks. Then the call came. It confused me, I didn’t know exactly what she was saying. “Something has changed” she kept repeating. Had it changed? I couldn’t tell. I remember hanging up with only questions running through my head. What does this mean? Why is this happening? What are we now?
My questions were answered the next morning with a text on my phone, probably sent late that night. “I think we should take a break”
. . .
Like I said, this is not a love story. There was no happily ever after. After the break up, I just tried to get through the rest of the semester so that I could get home and talk to Julia about it. I set everything aside, including my dream to write a novel. The entire summer following our break up, I thought I could pull some wacky stunt and get her to immediately change her mind. I tried everything, from buying her gifts to even arranging for both of us to meet our two favorite bands, but I soon realized there was no hope. It was over, and there was nothing I could do to change that. I, however, still couldn’t get over her. I thought she was perfect for me.
If anything this is a break up story. It is the story of a journey that I took in order to get over the perfect girl. It is a journey that began on October 28th, 2009. I was walking through a concrete lined hallway filled with other students sitting outside their classrooms, silently cramming the last bits of information from their textbooks before their classes began. There was a bulletin board, covered in brightly colored fliers promoting everything from local punk-rock bands to extra-curricular clubs. One flier caught my eye. It was simple, vibrant, and set slightly apart from the rest of the mess. It only had a few words on it: “Quit being a ‘one day’ writer.” The message hit me. I was a “one day” writer. I kept telling myself that one day, I was going to write a novel. That day, however, would probably never come. I didn’t want to be a one day writer any more. There was only one pull tab left on the bottom of the poster. I tore it off and put it in my pocket.
I would follow the website address written on the pull tab to nanowrimo.org later that night.
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