“it’s not you, it’s me”

I have this dream where I’m on a bike, in a real picturesque suburban neighborhood. I think its November, no, October, definitely October. There are leaves speckled through the sky and along the gutters. Cars line the street in perfect order, midsize, family size, car seats, duel airbags. Smoke out of the chimneys, no one on the roads, the whole deal, real pretty, a Kincaid painting. I start to peddle down the street and I’m on my old Shwinn, a five speed, silver, paid extra for it to be chrome. I’m going to my wedding, I see a church in the distance, there’s a steeple, a limo, a gaggle of bridesmaids. I pick up speed, feel the wind up my nose, the rubber in my hands. Suddenly I stop I turn around but the church is still there. The faces of the formal wedding guests grow long, they call for me. Then the mood around me changes, everything becomes dimmer like when the lights go down in a theatre. The wind stops sweeping up the leaves, they all sit still. I stop but I don’t know why, let go of the handles and look up at the sky. It changes, it’s purple, maybe dark blue, it’s hard to tell then the sirens start, helicopters appear above me and I watch children start to run and cry from their homes. Fiery rocks belt down from the sky and begin to hit the earth only steps away from me, there’s smoke everywhere but not from the chimneys. It’s hot, I feel a terror in me, shrieking, unprecedented, hopelessness, I know that it’s the end.

            I wake up, I open my eyes and watch my lashes squint, adjust. I see the sky again, it’s clear and blue, the same as it always is in Arizona. I feel like I’m lying on sandpaper, I push my body up and recall where I am: the roof of my neighbor’s house. It’s vacant, my high school boyfriend and I climbed up there the night before and sipped warm scotch from his father’s collection until the wee hours of the morning. I don’t remember falling asleep. I look over at him and he’s sleeping soundly on his side. I decide not to wake him, I know we’ll fight about it later; I carefully scale the side of the house until I feel my feet crunch against the gravel. I walk away, and for the rest of the day the images of my dream replay in my head over and over as if trying to offer me some sense of it.

            I ended my relationship with this particular boy a few days later. Maybe it was because of the dream, maybe it was because he liked to drink a lot and go on never ending tangents about Akira, maybe it was because from the moment I began to partake in the traditional idea of a “relationship” I thought they were a bunch of bullshit.           

            My subconscious was right; a conventional relationship when you’re young can be detrimental to your emotional growth. As a person still not of developed maturity it seems ridiculous to me to submit all of your emotional vulnerability into one single person. In order to grow into a well structured adult unaffected by codependency issues and the inability to be by yourself it seems necessary to me to experience a multitude of others, and I’m not speaking in a physical sense.

            Furthermore, the hardcore relationships that I do see with kids my age seems to be nothing more than a perpetual whirlwind of drama wrapped tightly in some pink tied up package called “love”. I see some couples get engulfed in an avalanche of infidelity, infatuation, mutual disrespect, lies, sex, lust, new fucking myspace blogs that proudly advertise their problems as blatant as their spring break ’04 photos then partake in elaborate fights at bars yelling out names and slurs to the beat of some really lame hip hop song.

            I often spew this theory to friends and few are receptive, they assume I am just a cynic or a pessimist someone never truly affected by the powers of a really great relationship. Yet my qualm is with the idea of a conventional relationship, not with love itself; for I do believe in the kind of weak-in-the-knees-stomach-dropping-make-out-all-night-to-the-acoustic-version-of-the-foofighter’s-everlong kind of love (not that I really like the Foo Fighters, but I do like that one song). I do believe in the existence of true love I see it in the way my Mom looks at my Dad when they’re kind of loopy and she’s fixing him another vodka soda, I see it when my two lesbian friends ritualistically eat chicken wings in front of the history channel all night, and I’ve felt it hard like the way your stomach feels on the first big drop of one those huge six flags rollercoaster’s. My qualm has never been with love my perplexity lies with the obligation of a relationship and everything it requires of you at such a young age.

            Be it love or monogamy or sex or whatever, it’s kind of tiring to peddle towards some ultimate goal, some perfect structured relationship under some perfect white chapel that, according to my dream, may just bring about the end of the world.

            For me, there have always been a million ways to be in love and practice your love and they don’t all have to fit into society’s idea of normal, they don’t all have to work so hard to be free of jealousy and/or infused with monogamy, it goes against your natural instinct as a young human being trying to figure out who you are. There are a million people that exists around you each one having the potential to show you something new about yourself to help guide you into individuality with variety.

            So I guess I feel like I’m still peddling towards something but it’s not a chapel, it’s not a gaggle of laughing bridesmaids. My world gets hit with those

same fiery rocks everyday and everyday I’m grateful that they bring about the kind of excitement, that kind of break from the norm that I have always been so addicted to. Yet, to be honest, sometimes I think that it’s just my knack for rhetoric that allows me to justify any character flaw I may have, be it a fear of commitment or a simple inability to be completely faithful. Either way, there’s no fucking way I’m ever getting married, at least not in the October.