What's Stopping You?

My senior year in HS, I was selected to be Editor-in-Chief of the school newspaper. There'd been only a few applicants for the Assistant E-i-C position, and the most surprising was one was a girl named Erin. ( Read more... )


The point I'm trying to make, subtle though it may be, is that even back then, even with such a non-emotional subject, I worried more about helping others than seeing my own needs met. In that moment, I didn't care if she was the right woman for the job, I didn't care if we would work well together. She had the courage to admit she needed validation from me, and I wanted to give it to her.

I don't just do it in relationships, and I don't know where that comes from, or if it's healthy, or if it's something I should try to reign in.

I usually hate writing this style (the poetry at the bottom, not this strange gushing prose up top here), and it's completely a first draft, anyway. No idea why I even bothered writing it out.

Still, salt box stories. I had quite forgotten those. Summer camp, my junior year, one of the most horrifically demanding seasons of my student life. "Yet, somehow, at three AM, long after my Alaskan Dream had fallen asleep, I had found Annie, whom I didn't even remember until I read her notes.

We sat on these wooden boxes that littered one section of the campus, and I'd amaze her with tales and adventures and the most meaningless diatribes. Even then, I was a talker, and she adored me for it. One night, driven by my own words to fresh heights of curiosity, I finally gave in to the temptation to rip open one of those boxes and find out what was inside: rock salt. You know, for winter.

But winter was a dream-song of another era, when you're seventeen in the summer, when you're just beginning to have some idea of what women are good for besides reaching out for their trust. Rock salt in summer is a kind of foresight that was utterly foreign to this young, cocky, expectantly romantic boy who never knew the length of his shirt. That summer was when I first realized that you could do more with a pretty young lass, then puzzle out her defenses and earn her trust. Earning trust had become a game to me, by then, a thing I practiced at with other girls for the Real Show, for Angel.

Poor Annie, she was no match for me. I unlaced the corset of her defenses as quickly as Angel can undo a man's belt.

Poor Annie, for the first time, I had some idea what I might do with that trust. And with the kind of unthinking simplicity which comes to unthinking boys, I tested those ideas out on her. Yes, quite nice. I shall have to try this with my love.

Sweet Annie, I had quite forgotten you. You tried to pry a few more moments out of me, with your words, but I had long ago learned to shield myself from the kinds of petty attacks you had made. You wrote me a letter every day, after that night, when I finally showed you what might still my tongue.

Ha! That's poetic license. I don't even remember what happened between us, but she writes of a single kiss.

Poor, sweet Annie. I had quite forgotten you, but all your words are still locked up in my desk drawer at my parents' house. The picture you gave me is still here, too, though no matter how long I look at it, I do not recognize you.

Is it a comfort, to know that your words, all that vast array of special stationary, they made it back across the states to my home? Is it a comfort to know that I carefully ordered and numbered them, kept even the envelopes they came in? I labeled and organized all your desperate pleas for me to love you back.

And then I put you in a drawer.

Thirteen years later, you snuck out past the giant pile of letters from Alaskan Dream, and slid out of order and out of your envelope, just far enough for me to read these words:

Sing Me a Salt Box Story.

Oh, sweet Annie. I had quite forgotten you.


( Read more... )