When I first met Tommy, he
confused me. He was just like every other guy I had turned away in my life that
had become obsessed with having the latest and greatest beautiful girl hanging
off their arm. I mean, I knew I was pretty. I had always known that for the
most part. I was awkward and had an overly strong sense of independence. I knew
that what I wanted for my life, and rather than expecting to find a man to
enhance it, I knew that men complicated things. I feared emotion because it
strayed from the logical world I lived in, and had no relation to the imaginary
world I had created in my head. I was a superhero and a business man all at the
same time, and the last thing I needed was somebody to come along and try to be
another hero... I can save myself.
Maybe
it was my confidence that attracted them. Even though I was internally
terrified of just about everything around me, I carried myself in a way
different than the other girls who looked like me. They were all timid and giggly
with their chests pushed out, indirectly proclaiming that they need someone to
swoop down and complete them. I held myself tall for others to see, even when I
didn’t feel tall myself. That’s what kept them interested: the age old fact of
people wanting what they can’t have.
I met
Tommy in the park… well, sort of. I didn’t really meet him, he kind of met me.
I decided to take my notebook down to the river for the afternoon, to sit down
on my favorite rock just off the running path on the edge of the river. It was
the first real warm day since the winter, and I put on a dress in the morning.
“Jamie Rae,” my mother screeched when I walked down the stairs in the morning
in that condescending, nasal tone. “That dress makes you look like a hooker.”
The way she says hooker makes your
spine cringe the exact same way that it does when she says Rae as she drags out
the vowels of the word. Hooker. The
dress was short and flowy, with buttons from the waist up. The peach color was
lighter than my skin tone and brought out the red tones in my hair that was
gently braided over my shoulder. I knew I looked far classier that your
everyday hooker, but for some reason that day was the one day that I didn’t
actually care what my mother said. I wasn’t planning on going to any of my
classes, rather spending the day by myself in the sun. So the fact that I
looked like an apparent hooker wasn’t
a real concern.
I was okay with being alone. I
mean, I was a writer, well… kind of. I didn’t really write, per se, I more
recorded my imagination. People would say that it’s the same thing, but I
disagree. My imagination goes to these amazing places that would exist whether
I chose to write them down or not. I was a thinker… most definitely a thinker.
So I decided to take my notebook down to the river for the afternoon, to sit
down on my favorite rock just off the running path on the edge of the river. I
was in the mood to think, to be alone, and to blissfully escape into a world I
was familiar with.
Maggie: a 70 year-old wife of an
abusive husband. I don’t really know why my mind always jumped to her first. I
often wrote about her world, morphing the grotesque details of the events in
her life into colorful words that give people shivers when they read about her
and her son. Maggie was fictional, of course, but I identified with her more
than I’d ever really identified with another person. I loved thinking about
Maggie, especially when nobody was concerned with what I was thinking about. Some
days I’d be in class with my notebook and people glare over my shoulder in
disgust of seeing the words describing the way Maggie’s husband looked at her
son. To me, it was recording, giving Maggie a voice. To them, it was disgusting,
regardless of whose voice it was. So that day in the park, sitting in my dress
with my notebook and not a care in the world, those are the kind of days I
liked to think about Maggie the most.
That very day as I sat up against
my favorite rock on the edge of the water, Maggie was telling me about the
first time that her son found out she had known what her husband was doing
since the day that it first happened. Her words shook as they transferred onto
the notebook, as I was taken back into a world that exists beyond here. The
runners would pass me in the sunshine, and the rhythmical pattern of their
steps would take me further onto the page and the sound of the river at my feet
was constant; calming. I felt beautiful; but not in the way that people saw me.
Sure, I was physically attractive in the moment. I had my dress draping
perfectly over my lap and my hair curling and flowing over my shoulder as if it
went on forever. And my eyes… I mean, I knew I was pretty, but pretty isn’t
what I felt. It was something that only I could understand in that moment:
free, like I was glowing from the inside out in a way that only I was able to
experience.
Even though that ten seconds of
unexplainable beauty had felt like hours in the moment, that moment didn’t last
as long as I had hoped it would. I was dancing with Maggie’s dark nostalgic words
across the page when the sunshine was taken from the sky, and within an instant
I was brought back to being plain old Jamie Rae, the recorder. The sun wasn’t
exactly stolen, rather just blocked… by a stranger. It was a tall, broad
shouldered man with perfect hair and a face that could stop a thousand hearts;
exactly the kind of guy that I had turned away time and time again. He just
sort of, well, stood there. He stared, and I stared back. I had examined every distinct
feature of his face, every perfect curl in his hair, the intricate sharpness of
his jawline. I stared back until the silence had passed the point of tolerable
and began easing into awkward. His perfect jawline hesitated to move as if he
was confused as to what to say next. Rather, what to say at all. It seemed as
if he had planned out his approach until the exact moment that he arrived in
front of me. As he hesitated, he finally took a deep breath, glancing quickly
at his feet he then looked up at me once again. “Why would a girl like you ever
have anything to do with a guy like me?” I stood up from the ground, confused
but intrigued. It took me a minute to look back at him, because I knew he was
just like every other one. I liked being alone. My world worked for me. I
wasn’t willing to leave it just to be his newest pretty girl hanging off his
arm. I didn’t even know who he was, but something about him made me want to
find out. I repeated his question he had asked a million times over in my head before
I was even realized he was waiting for an answer. He stood there patiently,
just as caught up in the moment as I seemed to be. It wasn’t romantic; it was
just perfectly awkward in a way that that seemed habitual. Why would I ever
have anything to do with a guy like that? “Why not?”
