Message in a Bottle

I am a bad blogger.  I forgot about you, and I'm sorry.  I can't promise that I won't do it again because most of the promises I've had made to me have been broken.  That says little about me because those promises were not broken on my behalf; it just means that I know how transient promises and bonds can be.

If someone sees this one day, know that I'm a 24-year-old who still hasn't figured everything out yet.  They say that you don't know who you are until you lose yourself in someone.  I've done this twice now.  Now, I know who and what I am (my best friend has told me that if I am a fool a third time, she will punch me in the face.  You need friends like that).  I will not bend to someone else's image of me, and I will not walk on eggshells to avoid conflict with the people I date.  Instead of sweeping things under the rug and allowing offenses against me to pile up and drag me to a position of impotence in my relationships, I will address the problems head on.  I drown in my own thoughts and self-doubt as it is.  I don't need to get sucked into someone else's toxic whirlpool and go under completely (not again, anyway).

For once in my life, I know where I'm going.  For once in my life, I know what and who are not coming with me.

Thinking Outside of the Circle

As I've gotten older, I've learned some very important lessons. In my bank of wisdom, I now have deposited the following tidbits of information: two hours spent poolside in Florida is not equivalent to two hours out in the sun in New York, so you must always wear sunblock, especially if you're vacationing around the Summer Equinox; blinking red lights are just like stop signs--do not wait for them to turn green, as they never will, not even on road tests; and make sure that the liquid you're pouring into your cereal from the gallon-sized container is, in fact, milk, for orange juice-flavored Fruit Loops are not nearly as tasty. However, the most important lesson I believe a person can gather deals with two elements that are essential to my existence: love and friendship.

When it comes to relationships, I believe that partners should be like apples and bananas. They're great apart, but their union can create a new and intoxicating fusion of flavor. When the union goes sour, however, the two fruits begin to taint one another's unique savor, and it's best to separate them before any irreparable damage is done. The apple and banana can then scurry back to their respective bushels and bunches, obviously changed by their experience, but able to regroup independent from each other.

No, I'm not just hungry, though this brief discussion has put me in the mood for a smoothie. What I'm trying to convey through this convoluted analogy is that, in my experience, I have found that a romance is best served when the participants come from different circles of friends.

Time and time again, I've seen it happen. One of my close friends will develop feelings for another member in my inner circle and pursue that person. Frequently, the chase is utterly and completely futile; the pursued individual has shown no interest simply because he or she does not reciprocate the other's affections. They are friends because that's exactly how the sought person wants it. These unrequited emotions can brood bitterness and resentment in the pursuer, leading to awkward tensions on nights that are supposed to be filled with drinking and laughing, not bulwarks and battle-line divisions.

Sometimes, however, the pursuit is successful, and the two friend-lovers are blissfully happy--for a time. When this union dissolves and the two go their separate ways, where, exactly, do they go? The apple and banana in my analogy were able to retreat back to their own fruit friends because they came from discrete, non-integrated trees. But now, these ex-lovers are in an awkward situation. Do they suck it up and continue to see each other when they spend time with their old companions, or do they treat the breakup like a divorce and answer the silent, almost inevitable question: Who gets custody of the friends? After all, there is usually one person who is closer to the group than the other, and to this victor go the spoils. This process leads to only more uncomfortable moments for the friends, as they must decide how to react once they see the ousted member of the circle of friends. Do I say "hi"? Do I pretend I didn't see him? Do I sit near him in class?

These situations have no right answers. No, you can't choose who you fall in love with, but I can offer only my experience as a form of advice. At 21, I have heard four "I love you"s and been promised five "forever"s. Now, I am single, and the only person who I know will part of my forever for sure is me. But at least I know that my future will not be lonely, as I can count on the good friends I've made to be a part of it, too. So when you're picking your partner, don't be afraid to fall a bit further from the tree. There are plenty more apples in the orchard.

I am What I am, and that's All that I Am

The relationship I have with my siblings is outstanding. I consider myself to be extremely lucky because of our ability to laugh and talk about everything. Even when we argue, the tiff swiftly devolves from a tangled ball of yarn to fine threads of gossamer, and finally, it dissolves before our very eyes. No apologies needed. No grudges held. This dynamic in our relationship is of key importance to the story that I'm going to relate.

A few months ago, my brother and I were having a heart-to-heart conversation in our basement, discussing life, love, and most importantly, sex. If you know a few things about me, you will probably know the following information: I have an obsession with the color pink, I sometimes speak in strange, Ron Burgundy-esque voices, and I am a virgin by choice. It is this final aspect of my character that often draws a few blank faces, confused stares, and questions. My brother, Matthew, is among those who can't help but ask, "Why?" With most people, it is easy to brush off the query with my response of "religious reasons," but with Matt, I dug a little deeper. Internally, I had marked a particular day as the starting date for my decision, but I never mentally filed it in my "reasons for virginity" folder. Not until my brother asked, that is. And so now I will tell the story to you in the same way that I told him. It is a story with which he and the rest of my family are familiar, but the specifics are never recalled in quite the same detail.

It was the winter in the year 2000. My sister, Dyana, had just turned 16, and after watching American Pie and hearing about sex from various sources, I was a very curious, hyper-aware 11-year-old girl. Unfortunately for Dyana, she had just started dating her very first boyfriend at the height of my curiosity, and I became the Sherlock Holmes of all things sex-related with Dyana as my prime suspect.

On this particular evening in question, I sat in my room doing homework after school. Dyana and her boyfriend spoke softly in her room, which was something that occurred often. The click of the locks on her bedroom and our shared bathroom doors, however, piqued my interest and struck me as irregular. When I began to hear music issue forth from her room, the familiar scene from American Pie made me highly suspicious. Creeping from my room, I pressed my ear softly against the bathroom door. Nothing was discretely audible, so I went a step further. Lucky for me, the tile on our bathroom floor is highly reflective. Stooping down, I peered into the linoleum, which conveniently reflected my sister's bed. In an instant, eight years of Catholic school came crashing down on me. All I could do was think, sin. SIN! Suddenly, the apple-cinnamon Glade plug-in made me feel nauseous. It felt like a dream. I had to escape.

Shuffling down the stairs, I desperately sought my mother. Finding her at the head of the kitchen table, I stared at her with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING UP THERE!?" I hissed. She looked back at me and told me to keep my voice down. WHAT? She knows and accepts this? I was in shock. Why was I the only one who couldn't believe what I had just seen? "They're too young," I shouted. "Why aren't you doing anything?" With each "SHHH!" she gave me, I raised my voice ten decibels. Finally, the faint click of a lock in the distance and footsteps on the stairs assured me that my cries had been heard. I swallowed hard and immediately fell silent.

Dyana's boyfriend, who I will refer to as Rob, walked into the kitchen. He stared at me. I glared back. He made a motion to move towards me, and I countered him by walking in the opposite direction around the kitchen table. Rob switched his course, and so did I. For a few moments, we engaged in this mock Tarantella Dance until I saw my only escape: the kitchen door. With no shoes, socks, or coat, I made my move and darted out of the house. The shock of the cold against my bare feet was not enough to impede me from running across the lawn that slept beneath a thick blanket of snow. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Rob was pursuing me. I had to think quick. WHERE AM I GOING? In an instant, I knew. The pool shed! I just need to get to the pool shed.

I ran for the gate that led to my backyard and tried to push open its door. The snow that lay behind it allowed it to swing open only a few inches. Frantically, I rammed my then-overweight, stout body into the door and nudged it open a bit more. Hurry. HURRY. I had to make due with the space I had created and wedged my plump frame through the gate like a mouse slipping through a crack in a door. Too close for comfort. I felt my teddy bear-emblazoned shirt rip, but I didn't have time to mourn the loss of the shirt's inhabitant's eye. Rob was hot on my trail, but even at my size, he couldn't squeeze through the space that I had made.

Sprinting through my backyard, I ran up the stairs to my deck, trekked across my pool deck, threw open the shed's door, and closed and locked it behind me. There is a key to this door! He can get the spare key! I swiftly slid inside the bathroom in the shed and locked the wooden door. There's no key to this. I'm safe. I caught my breath and watched as it rose visibly from lips. In my excitement, I had forgotten how cold it was. I suddenly became acutely aware of how frozen and in pain my feet were. Seating myself on the chill tile floor, I cupped my feet in my hands and tried to restore them to their natural state. I had recently learned that Napoleon had underestimated Russia's winter and that his unprepared soldiers' feet had become so frozen from the cold that their bare feet sounded like clogs when they made contact with the road. This is how Napoleon's men must have felt, I thought.

Moments later, I heard the shed door's handle jiggle. For a few seconds, Rob banged on the entryway, but soon, all went silent. He's gone, I thought triumphantly. I'll just wait a few more minutes, and... CLICK. The pool shed's door had been unlocked, and I listened anxiously as it swung open on its hinges.

THUD THUD THUD. Rob was now pounding on the final shield of protection I had, demanding entrance into the bathroom, "Amanda! Let me in! I want to talk to you!" I was silent as I rocked back and forth on the floor, still holding the feet I thought surely required amputation. What started as slow, intermittent thuds quickly sped up into a drum roll. THUDTHUDTHUDTHUDTHUD. Imagining his face on the other side of the object he was now treating as a speed bag frightened me. I started crying softly. Please go away! PLEASE GO AWAY!

Finally, he got tired, cold, or some combination of the two. There was one final BANG, and he was gone. It took quite some time for me to peel myself up from the floor. I walked back through the cold, snowy path I had run through thirty minutes before and scurried to my room.

We never really talked about it again. Like all other arguments and problems between my siblings and me, this one seemed to fade away before it was ever really concrete. No one acknowledged who was right and who was wrong. All I know is that whenever I smell that apple-cinnamon Glade plug-in from the bathroom, it triggers this flashbulb memory, and I feel a sickness in the pit of my stomach.

Because this is what the cool kids do

As I am ever-inspired by my good friend Ashley Welch, I have created a blog on blogger.com, namely to comment upon her posts and annoy her. Unfortunately for me, however, someone has stolen the user name that I usually plug into these sites: iluvpink. To my horror, the owner of "iluvpink" has but one six-year-old post. Worse still is the fact that it is in grammatical disarray, and she continues to refer to her Blogger as a "blorg." BLORG. With an "r." I would blame it on the new Facebook option to view the social networking site in "pirate" English, but I don't even think Facebook existed six years ago. This offense will haunt me, and I think I will e-mail blogger about it.

So I've settled on my second choice, pink-ladi. Why would I be set on these two names? What few people know about me is that I used to have two websites: iluvpink.com and pink-ladi.net. Endless hours of tinkering and HTML encoding went into these sites, but I simply got busy and couldn't keep up with the traffic and demand. It seems that I always get busy. Even the fortune cookie I opened last night took a jab at me for this problem. "If you don't have time to live your life now, when do you?" it read. I don't know, fortune cookie gods. I don't know (see photo for proof of the fortune's existence; I'm not foolin').

In contrast to my bookwormy, reclusive demeanor, I've always had quite the extensive clandestine internet life (I'm even a closet-vlogger with about 180 fans [shhhh!]). I've kept innumerable journals, some using my own name, others under my alias, but I've abandoned them. A break from them is a break from my past. I'm not the same person I was when I started those journals, and they contain too many painful memories. I can't bring myself to reread the words of the broken girl who cried herself to sleep when some worthless jerk broke her heart. Why relive the flashes of jealousy she chronicled in her secret blog site two years ago? That girl is tired of living in the peaks and troughs of emotion and now seeks shelter in the throes of passion that accompany a life lead by love. This time, though, her heart will be guided by a true, real, and unshakable love that can never steer her off course. That love is the love she has for her friends, family, and herself. If a man dares seek her affection, they must go through her front line before reaching her. Friends, then family, then Amanda.

Don your helmets. It's time to play.

A Journey

I am trying desperately to forget your name. How can I remove your face from my memory banks? How do I purge the thoughts I have of you? Here, let me write them down, get them out, and at once be done with you...

Alas, this act is futile. By putting you into writing, my art, I am immortalizing you. I am allowing the thoughts of you and me to linger in another place. You conquered my heart, my mind, yet you thirst for more territory? Fine, take for your own this one-dimensional space that you're wasting. You already fill every part of my body; why not occupy this page, too?

With every heart-felt verse I read, there is increasing, sharp pressure on my heart. The pain of a love lost. You pierce me internally, and instead of running crimson, a vision of who we were flows from my fresh wounds. The noxious memory trickles out and wreaks havoc on my soul. From within, you destroy me. Visible rivers flow right before my very eyes.

I dream of you. In my dreams, you are happy. You are in love, and I am bitter. As effervescent as these chimeras are, they haunt me in my waking hours because they are not far from the truth. In reality, you are happy. You are in love, and I am bitter.

These thoughts are for nothing. I am not a part of you in the way that you are a part of me. You do not think of me, and if you do, it is with disdain that you remember me. In truth, I often hate you, but there is a part of me that recalls how you were, not who you became, who you really are.

I miss the man who loved me with the same fierce intensity with which I loved him. I long for the one who cradled me in his arms and made me feel safe with just one deep kiss. Without warning, you swallowed me, and I happily collapsed into you. Without warning, you changed. Without warning, I changed. In finding you, a boy who didn't know who he truly was and who posed as another, I lost myself. The man I love and loved was just a figment of my imagination; he never existed. With unclouded eyes, I see this.

Once, I had a dream in which I told you these words, so I must believe them to be true: I do not love you anymore.