Ch-ch-changes

They say that college is supposed to be a chance to push the reset button and start things over. Whoever you were, whatever kind of person people assumed you to be back home has no barring on who you can become. College is an event noteworthy enough to promote change, enormous amounts of change, some times more change than one really wants to make in the beginning. Or at least that was what I had been hearing for the longest time. I got speeches from my mother about “the dangers of alcohol” as if the moment she turned her back I was going to become an instant alcoholic stashing bottles of vodka in my mini fridge and seeking refuge and a guide for my staggering steps in shady mysterious men I had never before met. And much the same was to be had about “the positive correlation between college and drug experimentation” and “experimentation” in general. My pastor started speaking of “making good decisions” and not straying from the path of righteousness. I mean, I understand. Some people needed that, but I was not one of those people. I needed no forewarning. I was the last person to need those little lectures, so much so that I was pretty much pathetic.
I was that girl in high school who was infatuated with books; I couldn’t get enough of them. My nose was most often buried chapters deep in some novel, classic or contemporary, the bigger the book the better. I did my homework like I would burst into flames if I didn’t. It was terrible. When I had nothing else to do, I headed to the library just to soak up the intellectual atmosphere. On weekends, unlike my fellow classmates who would go out and get mind-numbingly inebriated, I would finish up anything had for some reason not finished earlier, read more of those dreadful books, or work pointlessly writing one of my own. The parties I attended usually involved popcorn and cheesy slasher flicks, or music and the pool table in Finn’s garage while gorging ourselves on his mother’s delicious cooking. Yes, I did other things unrelated to paper and pens. I was in high school, not a completely recluse. Though, I swear, I still had one of the most boring social lives of which I had ever heard.
I guess I wasn’t boring, per se. I was practical, but I had a feeling that practicality translated to utter dullness in the eyes of my peers. I had this thing about not letting myself have fun. I was so completely mental about it; purposely depriving my id from seeing the light of day and all of that Freudian junk. I must have because no one else was holding me back and yet I was always so incredibly restrained. It was a gift and a curse, my practicality. Adults found it charming that that I was so “responsible” and “sensible”, but those and their synonyms were words of taboo to me. I was eighteen, an adult in the minds of most. I could vote, kill myself smoking, buy all of the porn I wanted, and lose my entire life’s savings gambling, and yet I was completely un-evolved socially. I was socially retarded. Okay, so not completely. I had gone to some parties, real ones. I had been in the presence of people doing completely stupid rebellious teenage things, but I had never been happy about it. I had always been the bystander never a starring role. I had always wanted to be but I had this strange fear of doing something wrong for no reason. That I wouldn’t be as able to get away with it as everyone else. It would be my luck that the one time I let myself live I would meet with the consequences not yet seen by those seasoned veterans.
I was physically incapable of letting loose, doing things on a whim, seizing the day, like the gene for it was cut out of my genetic make up completely. I had tried to change it, but it felt like just a natural rut in which I constantly found myself. I planned and stressed over every detail of everything I did or planned to do. The cons always appeared as too much of a risk and the pros never outshined the looming darkness that was the unknown consequences to follow. But it was going to be different in college. There were no preconceived expectations of what kind of person I was supposed to be. No one knew me there. No one cared. Whoever I chose to be was going to be the person they’d come to know, not the person I once was. That was history, ancient history. And for once, it could stay that way if it was what I wanted, if I would let it.
Things didn’t always have to go down hill when they changed. Good things could come from change and I had figured that just about any change that I would find myself making would be an upgrade from my former self.

The Smell of Academia

I was on my way to Boston and the car ride and the sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach just reinforced how far away it really was. I still hadn’t figured out exactly why I thought the city so special, special enough to grant me living there. True, it was bigger that Aberdeen, but then again, just about any organized village you pulled out of a hat could fulfill that qualification. I just felt that it was, home to my college, Boston College, the next step towards making something of myself. I understand that I the same degree could be gained elsewhere, but it was the atmosphere that sold me. It was full of the kind of people with who I’d rather spend my time; intellectual, open minded, artistic people, the kind of people that were pretty much a rarity back home.

Other college towns were known to have the same kind of people; Boston just seemed to have more of them. It had the smell of academia and cultured young people all over it and I loved that. You know what they say about small towns; that the people there have small minds, right? Most people try to refute that statement, claiming it to be all lies, but I think I would know considering I had spent my whole life there. It was the truth to some extent. There were people who didn’t fit that description, I mean, I’d like to think of myself as more than small minded, but there were a great majority of people who out shadowed us. They were the kids who refused to speak with proper grammar, flew the confederate flag on their pick-up trucks despite our lack of being anywhere remotely near the south, and made constant racist comments about groups of people of which they had never once met a member. They were the people who never strived for anything better in their lives, only settling for whatever we there right in front of them. I can understand people who can’t afford college or simply don’t believe it to be the right choice for them for whatever reason, but the handful of kids who graduated years before me, yet still sit with their skateboard on main street corner with no jobs and plans to contribute anything to society apart from their graffiti masterpieces, they made me angry whenever I drove by and just saw them sitting there. I don’t consider myself and elitist by any means. I don’t really wish to look down upon people, but I just felt it a waste of whatever potential they may have held. They could have done great things with their lives, but they’ll never know thanks to how much they limited themselves.

I can’t just throw all of the blame on people my own age; adults were just as responsible for small town America’s bad name. I suppose it’s a never ending cycle; close minded kid turns into a close minded adult only to raise more close minded kids if there is no outside factors to influence them otherwise. In fact when I first old my parents that I wanted to move to Boston, my father had a near heart attack. He went on a tangent on how it was the most liberal city imaginable and was greatly responsible for the downfall of America. I promised him that I’d think for myself and vote Republican (oxymoron intended) when the time came just to calm him down a bit. I was pretty much politically neutral, but at least Boston would give me a different perspective to try out for a while and sometimes that’s all a person really needs in order to make up their mind.

I was just different from a lot of the people back home, hence why I was never a big fan of the place. I had some really good friends, obviously, and I wouldn’t have considered them at all like the type of people I described. But on a personal level, I had never really found a solid place where I felt like I fit in; I had different interests, different priorities, than the most of the people around me. Some were the same, but then again I liked reading classic novels and poetry, and watching old movies. I had unintentionally converted Finn to the same ways in regards to that. I liked things reminiscent of days past, back when things were a little more simple; old forgotten clothes tossed from someone’s attic and music played from records rather than cds, or even better, straight from the piano. I had always wondered whether I had been brought into the world at the wrong time or the wrong place. It was a safe assumption that given more people, there were more chances of finding that right place for me and that, that was something for which I had been looking forward for quite some time.

I saw moving away from home as an opportunity, not only to learn all of the academic book related stuff because that was a given, but a time to finally be allowed to be exactly the person I wanted to be, the person who had been trapped inside of me by all of the limitations of home. I was hoping to be happier there. Rather than focusing on all of the things that I could potentially lose, I was going to focus on what all I could gain; not about Finn or losing touch with each other, not about the things that I was leaving behind, but the things that were waiting ahead of me. This thing called optimism; I figured it was worth a try. Look forward, don’t look back.

Wallflower

In saying goodbye to my hometown, I was also saying goodbye to my childhood. Sure, I was beyond ready to leave the horrid town in the dust, but I wasn’t quite ready to let go of my childhood quite yet. I was an adult, true enough, but it felt as if time had flown by to quickly and I had somehow left a few pieces of myself behind. I just wanted a few minutes to breathe and be completely put together before I made the leap out into the great unknown. The whole leaving home idea had sneaked up on me, leaving me completely unprepared.
I never had a picturesque childhood. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t exactly good enough to merit writing about it. It was much milder, less adventurous, and much more boring than those had in novels or screen plays. Though my hometown was a setting perfect for such a thing, I never took advantage of it. Though I caught an awful lot of crayfish when I was younger, I never went skipping through cornfields or jumping off a rope swing into the old swimming hole. When I got older, I never hopped in to my boyfriend’s old pick-up truck after he had just suffered an interrogation from my father prior to our first date. I never spent my Saturday nights in dark movie theaters making out with the gentleman beside me, paying attention to the plot unfurling on the silver screen. I never got “grounded” or had the keys to the car taken from me for a week or so thanks to something stupid and irresponsible I did without thinking. I never went looking for trouble; never partook in any wild parties, no drinking out by the lake around a bonfire whilst singing along to someone’s guitar. I was never the prom queen, never the cheerleader with the long blond hair. I had only gone to one school dance, my senior prom, and only because Finn wanted to go but didn’t want to go about the formalities of really asking a girl to accompany him there. I never suffered through the drama of meaningless high school relationships, and never really had my heart broken. I had played the wallflower card. I wasn’t the female lead, but the girl in all black moving around the set furniture and taking care of the props to make everyone else‘s lives easier. I often wondered whether more than ten people would remember me ten years down the road.
In regards to some of that, people have often told me how lucky I am to have by-passed the messy stuff, to sail through without obstacles. But I saw each one of them as little landmarks to growing up, rights of passage, and I had dodged each one of them some how. To me, it felt like to call myself eighteen and an adult was a lie. I was as socially evolved as a twelve-year-old. Maybe that was why I had such as issue with leaving this life and moving to the next one, though I wanted to so badly. It wasn’t time yet. I was starting something new when I was not yet finished with what came before. I was emotionally and mentally grown up, but in the area of hands on experience with life, I had many miles left to tread. I had felt like I had only been really living for the last couple of years of my life and I was just looking to make up for lost time. Sure, normal people whine and complain about how terrible their teen years were and that I was lucky that I never had to learn the hard way. But I didn’t want anyone else to do my growing up for me. I wanted to make my own mistakes. I had focused all of my energy living for the future, getting good grades so I could get into a good college and finally get out of this town and make something of myself, but I never really lived at all for the present. I got what I wanted, I was standing at the very beginning of it all, and yet that still wasn’t enough. I had focused on the destination, not the journey to get there. After all, that was what made a person. It was the most important part and I had forgotten about it. I had taken the Concorde, the quick and safe way, when I should have opted for the commuter, less fussy and more bumps to be felt along the way. In the attempts to prevent myself from making mistakes, I had made the biggest one possible and there was no way to turn around to do it the right way next time.

Here's Looking at You, Kid

He was still there when I awoke the next morning; after all, he was the one to violently sneeze next to me which interrupted such sleep. I didn’t doubt that he was would be when I felt myself drifting off the night before. He was sitting up resting, his back against my headboard. The bed was completely made beneath him which made me think that he must have fallen asleep on top of them for them to be in such pristine condition the next morning.

“Good morning, sunshine.” He spoke with a smile. The way he sat there, doing nothing else, made it seems as if he had been waiting for me to wake, or else creepily watching me as I slept. I bet I was quite a sight to see, my hair sticking up wildly in every direction imaginable and those pesky little pillow fold impressions on my face. I might have even been drooling at one point because that was known to happen every once in a while. That was all certainly something worth watching.

I looked up at my alarm clock which I had forgotten to set. “You’d better leave. My parents will probably be up to pry me out of bed soon. I don’t think they’d appreciate the surprise.” Stupid rules. Stupid assumptions. Stupid parental worries. They were perhaps the upside to leaving.

“No problems, I already came in through the front door.” In other words that meant that he had been awake for a while. He had gotten up in time to leave without being seen and made his presence official by knocking on the front door to be greeted by my father none the wiser. We had invented this method a while ago. By now it went off flawlessly. “Your mom thought it would be okay if I was the one to wake you, but once I got back up here I just couldn’t do it.” I watched as he lay back down, mimicking how I must have slept on my side, but the then his arms moved and playfully captured me as their own. Hopefully I hadn’t happened do that in my sleep too. His fingers found my side, which was a terrible thing to do to a person as ticklish as I happened to be. I tried to stifle my laughter, but it was a lost cause. He quickly stopped to keep me quiet, but still forgot to let me go.

I didn’t want to move. All I wanted to do was lay there, right beside my best friend. This was home to me. This was one of the few things I was going to miss about the place, one of the things that were making this harder that I honestly should have been. Now it wasn’t the packing that made leaving feel so inevitable, but instead, simply getting out of bed. This was the last time I going to be in my childhood bedroom, the last time I’d wake up like this, at least neither for quite some time. As soon as I got out of bed, that was it. The day began and in a matter of hours, not days, I would be gone.

So I laid there with Finn a little while longer and didn’t say a word. His arms kept me from moving even if I wanted to go anywhere. I didn’t care anymore about my parents’ stupid rules anymore. Chances were that they would come up and see it all and I would let them think what they wanted to think and get angry about it. I was moving out, what could they really do anyway? I was going to be in a different state; they would have to give up eventually. “Are you sure you can’t come with us to Boston?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. I just hoped that it would be different if I tried again.

“I’ve got to go on my merry way to school today too…” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Not that I wouldn’t love to spend eight hours trapped in a car with your parents; your father who hates everything about me and your mother who absolutely loves me.”

“My father doesn’t hate you, he hates everyone. Don’t think yourself so special. And I’m sorry about mom, but I’m pretty sure she would jump at the chance to adopt you. I think she’s rather have you than me to call her own.”

“You‘d make her the happiest woman alive if we just up and got married one day.” I was never too fond of the surprisingly plentiful occasions where she had mentioned that every thought in front of us. Despite all that, I had hoped he had overlooked them somehow.

“Yes, but we’d have to tell her about it first. You know, I think she has the whole thing planned already. I wouldn’t have to lift a finger, but dad would positively kill you, you know. There’s no way to make both of them happy simultaneously. I don’t know how they manage to make each other happy, but somehow it works.”

“Kat, just stop talking. You’re ruining it.” He buried his nose in the crook of my neck and laughed doing it, most likely because my wild morning hair was invading his nose.

“Ruining what exactly? The fact that I have to leave is enough.”

“No. Stop thinking about it, not until it’s actually time to go can you mention going anywhere.” I could feel his breath; it was just as bad as the fingers to the side. It made my hair stand on end. I couldn’t help but to twitch and it couldn’t have gone without notice because he continued talking though it was completely unnecessary. “We can do this, right? No worries. Thanksgiving will be here before we know it.”

“Shut it! We aren’t talking about it anymore, remember.”

The vulture-like habits of my parents must have been set a side for the greater good, shockingly, because neither of them had appeared in my doorway with a disappointed expression on their face until I had already willingly gotten myself, and Finn, out of bed. Though a bit later, dad made his first appearance, but for the purpose of carrying boxes out to the car, and perhaps a little bit of spying attached. Then Finn and his constant battle to get on my father’s good side decided he needed to lend a helping hand, but that only served to make the time before we could leave slip away faster. I had so much stuff that even if Finn could have come along there would have been no room for him. There was barely enough room for me to sit comfortably.

I watched as the last box was brought out to the driveway. I could feel the fake smile fall right off my face as the back hatch swung closed. My parents stood motionless, without words, waiting, as if time had stopped for a second. I was surprised really that their impatience hadn’t taken over and shooed me into the car. My dad spoke. “It’s about time we get going,” he tried to word it as nicely as he could. Finn took that as a reason to stand with his arms outstretched in the middle of my driveway with his stupid little grin on his face. I stepped closer, as his stance commanded of me. My arms found their way around his waist in a snake-like fashion, my hold growing tighter on instinct. I wasn’t going to say good bye. We’d already done all that if not in different words. We knew what this could or would mean for us. Saying those two words wouldn’t change anything or make it any better.

He made a move to let go, but I resisted for no other reason other than because I could. He laughed, and I didn’t need to see or hear to know the difference. It was his nervous tick. Chances were, though I couldn’t tell, my face buried at the time, my father was giving his one of those looks again. So I let go, not completely, but just enough. He bent forward and whispered, “Here’s looking at you, Kid.”

It wasn’t the farewell I expected, though something in me probably should have. That kid knew what made me happy more than I did. I spoke back in a low voice, “I wish I didn’t love you so much.” Hopefully he caught the reference; I used my best Ingrid Bergman accent, but my best wasn’t particularly good. And even if he didn’t remember it, it was useless to apologize for stating the truth. Quoting or not, I meant the words the same.

I let go, finally. I let my arms fall lifelessly at my sides as if every bit of energy they once possessed had been expended all at once. I opened the car door and got in. As I struggled to find the seatbelt buckle beneath all the boxes and bedding, he pushed the door shut. As the car moved down the driveway, I could see him waving and I did the same. Once we reached the road, he gave up and headed next door only to leave shortly in the same way.

If you were to have asked me month earlier about that very moment months before it came my way, I would have been more than happy to see the lack luster scenery pass by my car window knowing that I would finally have a chance to live somewhere, anywhere, else. I hated the location, but it was the people and things that made the place bearable for eighteen year that made me question whether moving all the way to Boston was going to be my biggest mistake to date.

four big letters

Love. It’s a word that I never used often, mostly because I didn’t know exactly what it meant. Like those who throw big words into college entrance essays to make themselves look impressive when actually they have no idea what they’ve just said and thus, in its obviousness, look stupid instead; I didn’t want that to be me. For four letters, love was a big word to me, not in length, but in power, in the connotations and the baggage attached to it. So usually I just refrained from saying it. And like wise, I never heard it much, but for my mother. She’d say it as if for some reason I had forgotten. My dad was more like myself. The word was for holiday cards and important events; on any other day it was just a given. If we both knew, why say it all the time.

Another problem; it comes in so many different forms. How do you know every time that you’re using it the right way? There is the family kind of love, the (usually) unconditional kind used for your parents and siblings, if you have them. Then there is the friend kind of love, but even that’s got different degrees involved. You’ve got the “I’d be sad if you died” kind of friendly love, the “I’d be completely lost without you” kind and the “I might as well just go with you because I’d have nothing else left” kind. Then can’t family love and friend love overlap? Some times friends are like an extension of family, and other times people have crappy families and care more about friends than anyone else; how do you define things then?

Then there is that genuine romantic love, or whatever you wish to call it, and that seems to be the most confusing of all. Half of people don’t even know what that means anyway, considering how wrong they seem to be. They say that they are madly deeply in love, but are they really? Do they just love the idea of being in love? Do they love just not being alone for once? Is it just about sex, because frankly, for some people I swear that’s all it is? Is it a kind of love that makes one feel like they want to spend the rest of their life with that person or do they just think that they’ll do for the mean time until they find a suitable upgrade? People just throw the word around like it a one size fits all kind of thing when it is obviously not and in the process it kind of loses it’s meaning.

And how exactly does one know when they are “in” love? Is it like a disease; are there symptoms? I don’t think I’ve ever been in love, I highly doubt it, but I really don’t know. Is it the kind of thing that once it’s there the light clicks on and you just know without any solid reason? All I know is that I would rather not say it and find out later that it was love all along, than to shout it from the roof tops only to find I was wrong. If it truly was love, forgetting to call it as such doesn’t change what it is. When you label something as “love” when it isn’t, everything from there on feels like it needs to mold to that idea, changing whatever it was previously to this state of pseudo-love. I would rather it just be assumed in the level and type that is most appropriate for the situation until it is shown obviously as something more or something less than that. It should just stay the same; no use poking and prodding in things beyond my complete understanding.

I have to outline this first because it is a key to answering my most frequently asked question, or at least one of the top five. People look at Finn and me and they always jump to what they feel most common place; a male and female pair of young adults, surely they just want in each other’s pants, they simply can not be content as friends. Maybe that is the case for other people, but, though Finn may have nice pants, in them, I do not want. Maybe we’re just different. I will say that I do love the kid, in the sense that life as I know it would come to a screeching halt if anything ever happened to him. He’s pretty much the constant in my life. My parents aren’t exactly the kind to which I can turn in every occasion. I have no siblings, and even if I did, he still would have come first in the timeline of my life. I’ve had other friends, but they’ve been mere transients in comparison.

So yes, there is a certain kind of love there, but the companionate dependable kind, not the terribly misguided and often dangerous kind people think exists or has at one point existed between us. At least with Finn I learned that I knew how to love someone in some form of the word in an instance where I wasn’t obligated to love them because they had that unconditional parent-child love thing going on already. Though I’ve never told him, because he’s a guy and thus probably wouldn’t understand what I meant by it, I love Finn, but I’m not in love with Finn and, in my book, that little change in wording makes a big difference.

Just "Different"

“But really, why are you so worried?”
“The chances of us becoming completely different people are very high and I don’t think that we would be the same if we, individually, were different people. I just don’t want to lose…us”
“And what exactly is ‘us’?”
“You and me, friends…but the kind that don‘t happen to come around twice for one person.”
“Okay, so we’re impossibly good friends, by definition, doesn’t that makes us an exception?”
“Well, I want to do whatever it takes to keep it that way.” For being the end of August, it was colder than normal with the windows open in my old house. I could feel the breeze on whatever little amount of skin I had exposed because we decided to for-go the majority of the blankets available. I shivered and knew he noticed because for some reason whenever I would the untrained eye would say I looked to be seizing for a split second they made me move so much. He welcomed me closer and I let my arm fall rather lazily and ungracefully across his chest, with the sole intent to steal his body heat of course. For some reason he always had a surplus, so it wasn’t as if I was stealing anything especially important to him. So what was the harm? “I don’t know if you know, but I’m really going to miss you.” I had a thing about stating the obvious. Maybe it wasn’t necessary, but maybe it just was. My face was scrunched up into a smile and my nose wrinkled, or at least it felt like it and it was mostly to mimic the expression on his face at the time, but it had a convenient side effect of preventing tears.
“Like I don’t know that. I’d miss me too if I was you.” I could feel his muscles tense up at my subtle movement as if he was bracing himself for some kind of injury to follow by my hand. “O’Malley…I love you, of course things are going to feel different when you aren’t around.”
“Love me?” I had an annoying grin on my face and Finn knew why. True he wasn’t quite as emotionless as most guys, but he still wasn’t too likely to go out ad say certain things without first being mildly provoked to do so. He would often say that he needed more guy friends because if he spent too much time with me he was going to turn into a pansy. This moment was most likely one of those.
“You know what I mean…” Ouch, I shouldn’t have asked.
I wasn’t that I expected anything, or wanted anything, but it was the tone that surrounded it. It was like it was different for us, which, for some part was true, but he made different sound negative, when I had always thought of the word with a positive light. Though I wanted to argue, I held back. I wasn’t going to spend my last few hours with him arguing over something absolutely pointless as we did for some unknown reason time and time again. Finn wasn’t particularly good with words and this was probably one of those occasions, and for once I was going to let that be a passable excuse, and immerse myself in the comfortable silence of my room.

Tradition

It, at one point in time at least, was a tradition of ours; Saturday movie night. Finn and I since we had acquired the attention span to sit through a whole movie would pop a huge bowl full of popcorn and gather up as many blankets as our little arms could carry and plant ourselves in from of the television and watch a movie we’d never before seen. The venue would change every one in a while. Sometimes it would be at my house, other times at his. First we’d be in either of our bedrooms, as we could barely keep out eyes open after nine o’clock. Then years later it moved to the living room, much more convenient due to its proximity to the kitchen for midnight snacks. Though we would still venture upstairs simply because beds were much more comfortable for sleeping than floors and couches, plus the ability to close the door made it much easier to whisper secrets in the dark which out our mothers’ prying ears. Some things never changed though. We’d laugh hysterically, gorge ourselves with any kind of junk food we could find, but no matter how much sugar found its way into our system, we would pass out a few hours later amidst our fort of blankets and wake up for church in the morning.
When we turned sixteen we were told things needed to changed. My father wished to do away with the whole tradition altogether. Suddenly, in that old man’s mind, Finn went from the annoying little gender neutral kid new door who happened to be his daughter’s best friend, to dangerous, corruptive, hormone-driven terrible teenaged male who lives entirely too close. In actuality, he was pretty much the least dangerous of male specimens, held little power to corrupt me in anyway, and had my father actually took the time to see it, he would have found that he was kind of lucky that Finn of all guys happened to be my best friend. He was harmless. He was kind of like the Will to my Grace…except he wasn’t gay, of course. But he would probably hate me for putting that way, but I really can’t think of anything better.
A compromise was found between he and I and the tradition carried on, though altered in the respect that it wasn’t necessarily every weekend and it was never at Finn’s house anymore and it was always to be kept to the safe ground of our living room where my father could patrol if he wished. It was ridiculous, but I gave in rather than face the alternative of seeing an event spanning over ten years suddenly come to a demanded end. Finn thought the same, though began to fear my father to and even stronger degree.
So alas came our last night in Aberdeen; the last time we were to sleep under the same roofs as we did when we were but children, the last time to have the same address we had as when we were in grade school rather than some random dorm room number, and the last time in a long time that things could be as they had always been. So what did the two of us decide to do to commemorate the occasion, but to break the rules and serve tradition in the most traditional of senses.
My parents were not in a the least bit night owls and, considering we lived in the middle of nowhere, we thought little of locking our doors at night. Both made it very convenient for Finn to slip unnoticed from his own house and next door to mine. My house was old, decades old, and very loud when everything else around fell silent, but conveniently for us, the anxiety of leaving had caused temporary insomnia for myself, so I was hoping that any random footsteps overheard would be assumed as mine. It wasn’t that Finn was an overly worrisome nervous person, actually of the two of us that person was me, but whenever my father was factored into the equation he became overly cautious rather than his normal carefree self. It was ten o’clock and my door opened towards me without any effort from me and knew he had made a successful journey.
“How is it possible that we are now two legal adults and yet we still find ourselves being more secretive than was necessary before?” He had gone all out to keep from breaking tradition. He was wearing his pajamas, albeit “grown-up” pajamas of blue plaid rather than the footie superman ones of years past. His arms weren’t completely filled with blankets, mostly because at one point his arms were small enough to be filled completely with only one blanket, and that was simply not the case these days. In his free hand was a familiar movie case, Casablanca; my favorite…not so much for him.
“Because it’s just more fun that way?” I got up from where I was sitting at my computer desk, saved whatever little piece that I was writing and closed my laptop to adequately welcome him. I no sooner looked up and took a step forward and he had already caught up with me, his lightly freckled arms wrapped around me so tightly that I found it impossible to break free. My cheek was pressed up against his chest able to feel every bit of laughter he had to offer. “Sorry, but I forgot the popcorn…” He whispered through my hair.
I found it hard to fathom how life would be like without Finn, without my best friend, my other half. Things had never been particularly difficult between us, no long lengths of time that we went without speaking to each other, no moments in time where I ever wonder whether we were done, whether we would stop being friends because of anything that happened between us. Our little squabbles were fiery but fizzled fast. But we had never encountered anything so monumental as moving away, as heading off to college. I had heard horror stories of other friendships drifting off to nothingness when two different colleges and a few hundred miles became a barrier. Would the same thing serve as such an obstacle for the two of us? We were impossibly good friends, but we didn’t have super powers.
We lay on my bed, silent, watching the opening credits in black and white. My thoughts were moving a mile a minute and he knew it. Normal people would have figured silence to be a normal state of mine, but Finn, he knew better. Contrary to popular belief, I was a bumbling babbling idiot most of the time. “What’s wrong, Kat?” Oh, jeeze. He called me Kat, and he had that worried furrowed brow look on his face that he always had when he was worried. He rearranged himself, his arm draped around my shoulders, being me closer to him in his subconscious protective way that came out in him more often than he would admit.
“Will you promise me that things won’t change once we leave?” Whenever I spoke, despite how long I had mulled over and over what I was going to say, it always came out as if it just popped into my head, all unedited and unintelligent sounding. I’m sure I sounded like a worried little kid, but in some sense, I think I was.
“I can’t do that.” He stated it so bluntly that it felt like my stomach had fallen to my knees. My whole frame must have frozen for a split second, enough for him to take notice because he quickly continued. But I had a feeling that it wasn’t going to get much better. “It’s inevitable. There’s no escaping it.” I could feel his fingers resting lightly on my upper arm; he always felt blazing hot to me, but it was more so that usual. “We’re always changing; everyday, every second. We’re changing now as we speak, little by little, and there’s nothing we can d o to make it stop…it just happens.” Why was he all gloom and doom all of a sudden? That was usually my job, not his.
“Well then…promise me that we won’t change so much that we aren’t the same people anymore.” My tone was light, anything to bring up the mood of the room. Maybe I was a little over positive, grasping at straws, but it was necessary thing. “Promise me that we won’t lose us, that we’ll still keep whatever it is that we’ve got here.”
“Okay…but I don’t know why you’re so worried about it.” His sober stare directed towards the movie playing, one I knew he couldn‘t have found that interesting, broke into a smile. It was a “Finn smile”, one of those one was that could be read in all of his features; his eyes, most importantly. Maybe it was an Irish thing because, according to him, I was capable of the same. “Come on, we’re just going to college. It’s not like you’re going to a convent and I’m going to hell itself. We can’t change that much.”
“Actually, if you were to ask my mother, where you’re going is more of the convent than Boston...and why is the concept of a convent most associated with me? Why am I all of sudden so ‘nun-like’?” The more I spoke, the faster the words escaped from my mouth leaving little room for him to interject. If the whole writing thing didn’t work out, I figured I’d probably be pretty talented at being one of those, usually foreign, rapid fire telemarketers.
“Well, of the two of us…” His words faded out, mostly because the first six sufficed in luring my mind down the path as his was going. I figured that he thought it best to call it quits before he said too much and got me angry.
Though, of course, I knew all of that, every little thing he wished to say but refrained from doing so for the sake of his own safety. I would have thought he knew better than to even begin in that general direction. “Is this a sexist thing…or that ‘men typically go to a monastery not a convent’, or do you truly think I am that boring?”
“Ouch…you just burned a ton of sisters right there.” His smart little smirk had taken over his face, the one feature to which all of your attention was drawn, but no sooner he did so, he quickly turned and buried his face in my shoulder. He was being a smart ass as usual and even worse he thought, often, that being cutesy negated it all.“…And for the record, no. You are not boring.”

Where Did the Good Go

Goodbyes were something at which I was never really that gifted. Actually, I was pretty much terrible at them. My family wasn’t the “musical houses” type; I’d never moved in my life and rarely did the people around me. Aberdeen was a town than once you were there as an adult, you just never left, so therefore my parents’ roots were deeply rooted here. I wasn’t very experienced at this stuff. It never felt like saying goodbye and stealing a hug was ever enough. It would lead me to useless rambling and not wanting to let go of them, in every sense of the word. Where was the "good" in goodbye anyway? It was a terrible lie.
We both watched as she walked towards the door, our arms still remembering the farewell embrace with which she had just left us both. She was crying. I remember it exactly because it was something she never did. Actually, she’d rather die than be caught crying; the weak girlish act that it was. She turned abruptly in the doorway, as if she was about to make a run for it in the direction opposite of the way she was headed, but instead of sprinting back towards the two of us, she simply offered a final wave and a weak smile, her words apparently malfunctioning at that moment. The horn beeped again, her parents with their car packed impatient with our never ending goodbyes.
Part of it didn’t feel quite real to me, like when she finally closed the door it would open right up again and she would be standing on the other side, like it had been just some little joke of hers, the worst fake-out imaginable. But when the door closed and remained closed, I knew that was it. She was actually leaving.
“She will be back, you know.” Finn offered in soft words, a hint of laughter stringing them together. He moved towards me. I couldn’t see, but I could hear him, his light footsteps on the hardwood of the living room floor. Though my feet were frozen in their last steps taken, toes pointing toward the door, he couldn’t surprise me. That was the thing about old farm houses, they were sneak-proof, the floor boards protesting their years of use with every step. But I still didn’t move to acknowledge him. I couldn’t.
Too many thoughts were scattering in all directions of my mind, like a rubber ball dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t think that what I had just done, in theory, was going to be as difficult as it proved to be. I knew I would in fact see her again. She hadn’t died for heaven’s sake, but I acted as if she had. And the hardest thing was, that wasn’t the last time I would ever have to do that. The hardest was yet to come. It wasn’t that Sadie wasn’t important to me, but in comparison to Finn, there was far less history binding us together.
“O’Malley…” He whispered in my ear, and I jumped out of my skin. I had been too preoccupied with my outburst of anxiety to remember that he was still there with me. He hadn’t left, though I had been thinking so much about it that it felt like he already had.
I scurried to return my face to its normal appearance. Damn tears, stupid girly tears. I wasn’t supposed to do stuff like that. I was better than that, stronger that. But it was pointless to try because he already knew. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before, but it had become such a force of habit with everyone else.
“You still haven’t finished packing, have you?” He knew too well of myself to think anything else and, therefore, didn’t feel the need me to say anything in response to assume it true. Instead, his arm around my shoulder worked its hardest to unglue my feet and direct me towards the stairs, or in any direction for that matter. Though once he did, I scurried up the stairs on my own accord, leaving him to follow up the old creaking steps.
My room was a complete mess, its appearance to anyone else looking reminiscent to that of a tornado’s aftermath, but to me it was just organized chaos. All of my clothing, instead of folded neatly in my dresser drawers, were tossed in large mounds of fabric; one for certain yeses, one for those I would most definitely be leaving behind, and a series of piles that would depend on how much room I would have left, or what would be left home until the seasons decided to change. Nothing much was in boxes; they lay empty in in one corner of the room. It gave me a sudden headache as soon as I stepped through the doorway. Considering that, I couldn’t help but to make a b-line for my bed, landing right in the middle of it, though trying my best not to disturb the box of photographs I left there, the only box of which I knew I was not leaving behind any of its contents when I left.
“It’s worse than I thought!” That happened to be his response upon stepping through the doorway. Whereas he probably sprinted down the hallway, sliding in his socks for part of it as he usually did, he found himself suddenly slowed once he saw the mess through which he was sure he would find himself sifting whether he wished to or not. His eyes finally landed upon me and the disgusted look on my face and he cracked a smile. “It won’t take too long. Just throw it all in the boxes and you’ll be done. Nothing to worry about.” He shuffled his feet across the floor making a pathway in my direction, rather than step on my things as I had done.
“Alas, no. That is not in fact the case.” I scooted myself over, giving him room to sit down if he wished, but instead, he still stood, arms folded across his chest. “I will have even more about which to worry, because once I’m packed, that means I actually have to leave here.” Whenever I wanted to exceptionally persuasive I had to arrange my words like an English teacher, as grammatically correct as I could find possible. Finn always hated that, which made me do it all the more often.
“You still have to leave whether you have stuff to bring with you or not. So you’re really accomplishing nothing there.” He leaned forward, a hand extended for me. I took it willingly, but instead pulled swiftly and he easily fell over, his form landing with a clumsy bounce at my side. “Come on, just do it…for me?”
Persuasion was something for which the two of us had quite a knack. If only everyone else we ever encountered was just like ourselves we could have in our possession all we ever wanted pretty much. The kid’s pout and batting eyelashes were something he knew I was incapable of ignoring. I would avoid looking at him like he was Medusa himself, but he knew that regardless of how much effort I would give it, it would never go as planned. I would give in after a few minute fight and he would get me to do whatever he wanted. It was a good thing he never found reason enough to hate me. After a sigh of worthless protest, I laughed. That was perhaps the last time that would happen for quite some time, and for once, I actually I felt like I was going to miss it.

Just Like We Planned

I had applied to Boston College after I saw the place while on vacation, doubting I’d get in and, more importantly, doubting my mother would help foot the bill if I didn’t choose a place near enough that she could stop by any random day she felt like making sure that I remembered to eat now that she wasn’t around, or some other completely screwed up reason to believe that I couldn’t survive on my own. But for some completely bizarre, hard to believe reason I got a letter in the mail around Christmas with the most life-changing word inscribed on the heading: “Congratulations!” I was half expecting to see it addressed to some "Katherine" O' Malley or some other name that could have been confused with mine and sent to me by mistake. And even more surprising was how insane she thought me, after taking a look at the financial aid package I had been offered, for even hesitating to make up my mind, though of course, it still was not without crying as if I had died in a freak bus accident. With in a short amount of time she had returned to normalness and was getting out her check book to make out the first payment.
But I was the hesitant one. I wasn’t crazy. Boston was about a half a day away from home. I was okay with leaving my parents behind; I was supposed to be okay with that. I was eighteen for heaven’s sake, you were daft if you weren’t jumping for joy. But it wasn’t just my parents whom I was leaving behind, but my friends, the few I had. I didn’t have an overabundance of them like some girls did in high school. Whereas they had a whole address book full, I could count mine on one hand. But for me it wasn’t about the numbers, but about how much they cared and how much I could count on them to be there for me, ice cream in hand, when I was having a particularly bad day. There was rarely a day that went by when I didn’t see them, either by some preplanned day of gallivanting around town, some spur of the moment need to hang out at the local coffee shop and just catch up on the last twenty-four hours of our lives that had passed since we all had last seen each other, or just random occurrences when we’d stumble upon each others’ presences while downtown; our town was only so big and it would happen more often than one would think. The more I thought of it, the more bizarre it seemed that there would be one day in the not so distant future that we’d have to go weeks or months at a time with only phone calls and quirky little email messages to keep us from drifting apart.
Of the whole list of different colleges we were all planning on attending, mine was the furthest away. They were all staying safely within the confines of our lovely state of Pennsylvania, but I and my over rebellious, overly optimistic, need to escape everything that seemed to be holding me back from being completely and utterly happy with my life and where it was going, made me feel as if that was about the last thing I ever wanted to do. The one thing that made it okay was the little bit of hope that maybe Finn would follow me. I could get past my other friends leaving for college, all of us scattering in different directions, because it just seemed natural. It was a step we were all taking at the same time, just another thing to bond us all together. Sure, Finn and I were leaving at the same time as well, but Finn was different; with Finn it was always different.
Carey Finnegan, "Finn", and I had been friends ever since we were both still sea monkeys. Our parents were neighbors; our mothers, best friends. So naturally, we became likewise, though minus the gossiping over a day of shoe shopping; though I can’t say I never tried that of course. Unlike my other friends, he had been there for absolutely everything. He had been the one with whom I went crayfish-catching when I was about seven, and happened to be the one who helped me back home after I had fallen in, my knees skinned and my clothes completely drenched. And then years on down the line I had been the one help him, not back home, but to our old abandoned barn to sleep off his terrible first night of drinking, his parents asleep at home none the wiser. If there were ever two more inseparable people…well, there wasn’t. We were the two most inseparably bonded people I had ever met, like even those weird cases of Siamese twins joined at the head that you see on the Discovery health channel all the time. We were them, but much less inconvenient.
I guess I just had assumed that because Finn had been a part of every stage of my past, we’d continue to sail through life side by side like that was how it had always been meant to be. He had been such a part of my life that life didn’t feel like it would be life if he played a lesser role in it. We had grown up talking about how we’d finally get out of this town and that we would do it together, side by side. He had tossed around the idea of going to Boston and about trying his best to actually make a living off of his hobby of music. We leafed through books of information about one particular place, Boston College, which was conveniently a good place for writers and musicians like ourselves. Our eyes bugged out with excitement, like kids at Disneyland…and then, in a snap decision, he just changed his mind. The deadline came and went, and his blank application still sat upon his desk. We were leaving for college in a week, and rather that heading off in the same direction, he was backing up for some small public college only a few hours away from home, and for all intents and purposes I was moving a whole world away.
Part of me was insanely angry, but even more angry about how unjustified the emotion was. It wasn’t as if he didn’t get in, that he decided in the end that some other school was better suited for him, but that he didn’t even try. I never officially asked why he did it, but it was as if he wanted it to not even be an option for himself, like he was looking for an excuse for me as to why he was bailing on everything we had talked about ten times over. But then again, I couldn’t expect him to base his whole future on what plans I had just because his weren’t as neurotically figured out as mine had been for years now. I had always agreed with the statement that you should never schedule your future around other people because they might not always be there, that you should do what you believe what is right, not follow someone else and their path for the future, but tread in the way that you think is right for your own…and all that other philosophical junk. He couldn’t just toss out his plans simply to appease me, and if he did with that as his only motivation, it wouldn’t have made me any happier to tell you the truth. But for the longest time I had just assumed that our destinies ran parallel to each others', rather than completely askew.
He was going to be my lifeline, as he pretty much was already. I thought he was going to be the one thing to most easily convince my mother that I would not in fact die if I moved to a city any bigger that tiny old Aberdeen. Sure, Finn wasn’t the biggest, most intimidating guy imaginable, but by my mother’s definition, he was a guy and therefore capable of keeping young little defenseless me out of harm’s way. He would live next door, not with me of course because mother found that some how inappropriate for two youthful co-eds. She had never understood things between us in our high school days; she was most definitely not going to believe the platonic nature of two mixed gender friends when out of range of her little microscope. But for some reason, even though her tiny mind believed that as soon as we were out of her sight he and I would suddenly believe that rampant sexcapades between the two of us would be a brilliant idea, she would at least know that I was alive and breathing if he was around. It was the lesser of two evils. But he wasn’t going, so I guess in that respect she would be marginally happy. Some how, some way, she had managed to rearrange her logic. I would be journeying to the city alone, and she had granted me her permission, albeit warily, to go. Maybe she wanted some slasher to crawl in my bathroom window and do away with me, but our relationship wasn’t nearly that screwed up for me to believe such a thing. Maybe it was only me who thought things would be better if Finn was just there living next door in case I needed him.
I decided to go to Boston anyway, though not without a little whining and complaining, mostly to myself, about my self-centered disappointment. And of course I didn’t do so without a hint of bitterness, the thought that I was going to make sure that I had a better time than I could have ever imagined I would have had tugging around Finn’s dead weight. He was meant to pursue his future at Mansfield just as I knew in all of my being that Boston College was where I belonged and I had to understand that. I was going to be okay with his decision, just as he was okay with mine. I was going to smile and nod and be happy for him, but secretly I was going to make him regret not coming along with all of the crazy, unimaginably fun, stories I’d have to tell after a few months…hopefully.

Don't Stop Believing

If it had been up to me, and if money had not been the elephant of an obstacle that it happened to be. I would be leaving town after graduation and shipping up to Boston. I don't really know what it was that drew me to the place, but I was infatuated with it. I had only spent two days there in my life, on a trip there with the Finnegans. It must have been love at first sight; completely impractical person to person, but person to city...of course. It had all of the artsy atmosphere that I liked about the Village in New York, but without the snobbish attitude. And there was something about the history intertwined with the city that made it far more interesting than anywhere else that I had ever found myself.
I’d go to some amazing liberal arts school learning how to pen the next American classic and live in a disheveled South End apartment surrounded by lively open-minded, artist types, dye my hair bright red or something, and be completely self-destructive like my literary heroes. I would spend my days writing away in some intellectual bookstore-slash-coffee shop and my nights hanging with musicians in little Irish Pubs. I wouldn’t have much, actually, hardly anything to my name, but by choice rather than chance. It would just be me, my cat, my writing, and the occasional tortured musician or penniless poet that may cross my path and sweep me off of my bare feet in the mean time.
Of course that wouldn’t continue forever. Eventually something of mine would pass under a publisher’s impressed eye and boxes of perfectly bound books would be rolling off the presses, my name emblazoned on the cover in those metallic gold raised letters and a deeply thoughtful black and white photograph of me on the back. I would be able to afford nearly anything I could possibly desire; a better place to live, one with a movie set spiral staircase and a library full of old books with those sliding little ladders, the completion of my Beatles’ record collection, and of course a closet fully stocked with beautiful shoes. Boston would be my home, but places like London and Dublin would begin to feel like a close replacement after a while. And I would be just as happy.
The only thing I hadn’t figured out was the company I’d keep. I liked the friends I had and I found it quite doubtful that given the near six-hundred thousand or so people that would be buzzing around me, none of them would come remotely close to what I had with my relationship with Finn…or what I wanted with Finn. A person like that only comes around once for a girl and to go running in the opposite direction seemed like flaw in my whole master plan.
The picture in my mother’s mind that was most associated with my best friend involved me and a white wedding dress. I didn’t see that per se, but I didn’t picture myself cutting him out of my life anytime soon. He was my best friend and I had assumed that it was in the cards that no matter what either of us did with our lives, whatever weird connection was between us would be enough to keep from losing each other completely. Our lives seemed to be impossibly intertwined from the very start and the more milestones we endured side by side, the more little strings that tethered us closer together. But our time was up. In a matter of days I would embark on the lovely eight hour drive in a packed car with my parents to move into college.