interlude

A state of anticipation is conducive to writing. The pressure of all the pent-up stress, nerves, worries, and anxieties builds up until it pours into the page, giving the writer relief. For a while, anyway.

The problem is, once the thing happens, you’re too busy enjoying it to write about it. I have published a couple pieces that I wrote while agonizing about a potential relationship with a guy in my beginning voice class. Then said relationship began, and all writing stopped.

In an attempt to capture some of those memories and feelings before they fade, I’m writing down the stories as I remember them four months later. I’ll title all of them “The Phantom” (as in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera) in honor of the music that brought us together, and the boy who I will always remember as my Phantom.

In which I experience emotional overload

Dive off the blocks and into the sea of letters. A world of black and white where grey is a figment of your imagination, where the power of the written word is all you need to float onward, onward, into the bliss of oblivion.

Journal your life away. Too overwhelmed to live, too scared to love: hole up in a little den with paper and ink and plaster the walls with your scribbling. Papers, the palimpsest of a life. Scrape away reality to make room for the fiction.

Reality hurts. Its razor-sharp edges chip away what little sanity I have left. Maybe if I scurry away between the leather-bound pages and wrap myself tight in the parchment, it won’t find me. Safe and secure, never breathing, never dying, constant as the text on the page, I’ll be protected. Fiction my stronghold, fantasy my rampart, I’ll exist, and persist until the ink fades and blank pages remain. Clean, pure, and whole, without worry or regret or fear, simply…

Nothing.

In which I express my feelings rather than study for exams

I suppose, now I’ve gotten more exposure to the opposite sex, I understand a bit better. Why it’s so hard.

To wait.

I always figured it was easy, black and white—a solid brick wall you just can’t pass, and that’s that. I’ve decided to wait for marriage, so that’s what I’ll do. Piece of cake. Right?

Well, yes, that’s still the plan. But I think I get it now, or at least understand it better. When you get closer to someone, if there is a physical attraction, it’s strong. Powerful. I can feel it now, gripping like a vice, puling and working my insides like taffy. The alarm bells ring frantically in my head, warning, warning, but they don’t stop the wanting. The wanting comes through loud and clear.

It’s like powerful magnets. The closer they come together, the stronger the attraction, and the harder it is to keep them apart. Get them too close, and you have no more control—they snap together, whether you want them to or not. I’m scared that I can have such a powerful emotional reaction when all the while my more reasonable faculties assure me that anything that wouldn’t make it into a PG movie is a BIG mistake. I know that. I do. I just…hm.

I can’t help my emotions, but I don’t have to act on them. I can recognize them. I can channel them. I am in control, whether my body thinks so or not. I am in control. I am in control.

Maybe if I say it enough, it’ll be true.