Love as Far as I Can Tell

a short piece

You meet the girl you will love forever in between cash registers. At this point in your life you are still young and failed your first year of college (read: 0.0 GPA). You still think everyone wants to hear what you have to say. You are full of unexamined confidence. You are 19. When there aren’t many customers, you bag for the other cashiers. Over time it becomes clear there is a certain register you gravitate to. The cashier you bag for has hair that is a faded red, the dye from early high school still bleeding through the brown. She is 17. She is quiet, perhaps a little simple, although her eyes are serious. Her first name is beautiful. Her middle name is silly. She is 17.

At first you pursue her for sport. There are girls who are prettier, girls who are more popular. She, however, is ‘in your league’. Perhaps even below it, you sometimes find yourself thinking. You find out that she likes the same music and are surprised that the songs she recommends are actually good. Like, really good. Your coworkers start to see the two of you as an item. One day she offers to buy you a ticket for an upcoming show. You say yes, partially out of a sense of social obligation and basic kindness, and partially because you have nothing better to do.

You are at a point in your life where most of your time is wasted. Weekends (and weekdays) are spent getting high. It is pretty much the only thing you do with any regularity. That and masturbate. Most of your friends are similar. You used to have hobbies, interests, et cetera, but you have either forgotten them or deemed them uncool. It has dawned on you that there may be some connection between the substance abuse and your failure at college, but you write this connection off as hazy and nebulous at best.

She accidentally slices her thumb while cutting your hair and some of it drips on you. It is a week before the concert and this is your first date. Later, in your room, you try to kiss her. You do this only because you are not yet in love. If you were you’d be too scared to try. She rebuffs you. Looks quizzically at you with her owl-like eyes. You explain what you’re doing. Ask if it’s alright. She says slowly that it is. There is a small kernel of excitement building in her dark eyes that would be reflected in your own if you could see them.

Her parents drive you to the show. The venue is loud and crowded and violent. It is your first live show. There is a pit and people crash into each other like waves, leaving brief spaces in the throng that are quickly filled in again. You are nervous and wrap your arms around her. They are laced around her ribcage. She is your only reason for being here. You hold onto her for the whole time.

For a while you two do not have sex. She is a virgin and you are not. It annoys you. You push her to give it up before she’s ready. In your mind she has come out on top in the dating game—you are more of a catch for her than she is for you. Dates consist of the songs you both like, watching Jeopardy, eating Wendy’s and going to more concerts. You see her almost everyday now. The first time you eat dinner with her parents you are very nervous. They are not like your family. She is an only child. They are poor. They do not eat altogether around the dinner table, but at the couch in front of the TV.

One week her parents go away. You two spend all week together in the open house, playing husband and wife. There are long slow mornings in bed, silver dollar pancakes and the loose leopard print pajama shorts she wears to bed. You two are fucking regularly now. You begin to wonder if you are in love. It doesn’t bother you that she always answers your texts right away or that she needs a good morning and a good night, always. You wish that other people were uncomplicated like her.

One afternoon she tells you, flat out, bluntly, that either you stop doing drugs or the two of you stop dating. At first you’re offended. At her controlling, even boorish, nature. You think that at your age you are practically supposed to take drugs. But you don’t want to lose her. The more you think about it the more an idea forms in your head. Ever since you were a kid you’ve been chasing the various highs of misbehavior. What if you just tried a different way? Saw how it felt.

Sobriety is not easy. You relapse 3 times all at around the 6 month mark. There are meetings in candlelit church basements, sponsors, and torturous afternoons in her room where you don’t say a word because if you do you think will utter something so caustic she’ll cry or have a fit and then you’ll be stuck for hours hugging her in warm dark silence because nothing else will calm her down. When moments like this occur you opt for sleep. Sometimes you sleep as early as 5 pm, right after you both get off work. It gets easier with time.

With one bad habit gone your other has begun its work in earnest. Without the support of the other, pornography becomes a load bearing vice. At some point in the drug quitting phase you subconsciously told yourself you’d keep this one. You know it’s wrong not because of any ethical arguments against the production of the content, or religious arguments against the inherent nature of the action, but simply because you don’t feel right telling her about it. It eats at you. It makes you act in ways you don’t like. Causes you to think too much when you’re making love. Removes a part of you from her.

It happens again. You are in the red walls of your bedroom, no one around but you and her. Your thoughts start off small and ramp in intensity. Constant mental verifications that you feel a certain way, envisaging a certain thing or embodying a certain desire. Soon you can barely think through all the babble. You feel cold and as though there is not enough blood flowing through your body. When you can’t get it up you fully freak out. Wild-eyed, things have lost their place in the world. You think she will never see you the same again. When she talks to you there is a soft concern in her voice that you latch onto. You are waiting for the shoe to drop. Waiting for her to leave. She never does. You lie there with her, head on gentle chest, your beating heart calming itself over a span of one… two… three hours. There is talk of everyday things. She makes you smile despite. The shame that once felt so thick you’d choke on it slowly seeps out of you and disperses into the air. Yielding to her warm pressure. The last secret comes out. It is not unlike Confession. You tell her of your habit of self-destruction. How you have harbored and stoked it from an age as young as 12. How it morphed into darker and darker forms and over time grew in depravity. That fetishes burrowed their way into you and that you’re scared they will never leave. How you’ve gotten better at repressing the unpleasant thoughts that come after. There are tears. You don’t usually cry. These words tore you up on their way out, but in her shared light they seem less apocalyptic.

It is then you know you love her.