letter again.

Dear the boy under the lamp post,

I've spent a lot of time laying in bed with my eyes wide open lately. And all I've been able to think about is the future.
Talking in that diner for hours had the strangest affect on me. Especially because I am still thinking about it.

Initially it made me feel like I was sixteen again. I physically felt like I was 5'4. I put my feet up on the dash board and you looked at me just like you did three years ago.
Then sitting there drinking too many glasses of water just as an excuse to stay I felt more myself than I've felt in a long time. This is always the affect you have on me.
As I slammed your car door I couldn't help but look back at you and the person that you still are after all of this time. You are still the boy under the lamp post.

And now for the part I've never said out loud: You are the person I thought about when I was Eve and any other character I play for that matter. Whenever I am searching for an emotion I find it in one of our past conversations. I am a good actor and writer because of the material and the things you have made me feel.

The crazy part is I can still be happy with someone else because of everything you have given me without ever even realizing it.

Always,
the girl under the lamp post

it has been a bad summer.

On June 11th I stood in my nearly empty dorm facing my bulletin board. It was still covered with the faces of the people who I cared about most.
On my first night alone in my room I carefully placed all of the pictures across from my bed and throughout the year when I was disappointed or felt by myself I sat on my bed and stared at those faces.
I was sad to leave school for a few months but my excitement to see everyone again outweighed everything.

Things are different. Its hard for me to pin point when things changed because it was presumably when I was away.

This summer my best friend was in Europe, I was bed ridden with some mysterious undiagnosed lump, my guys hung out with their girls and everyone sat around and smoked.

It isn't the same. I was naive to think it would be.
somehow, its okay though.

UP.

"I just want to go...somewhere."

My head and heart filled with a familiar weightlessness and I pulled the cuffs of my jacket over my hands. The music was soft and unintentionally made me want to say things I haven't even thought about in a year.
I chose to forget about that eye contact and yet there it was, as penetrating and honest as it always was.

"Okay. Lets go."

*regardless of everything I feel as though I will always think of you before anything begins.

melted ice cream and my generation.

As I inhaled my sushi on my five minute break at work I watched a girl who must have been around my age and a boy who looked no older than sixteen sitting across from me in front of an ice cream shop.
The girl was pregnant, and wanted everyone to know about it. The boy rolled his eyes as the girl complained about her swollen ankles and how eating ice cream made her feel fat.
I suppressed a laugh as I ate my last California roll.

"I DON'T WANT THIS ANYMORE. YOU FINISH IT." she said thrusting the cone in the boys face. He took it and leaned over and kissed the girl on the cheek.
"Babe. You're not fat. You're beautiful. I will love you always." he said in a flat, unconvincing voice as he touched her stomach.
"GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF ME AND MY DAUGHTER." She said as she dramatically left the plaza.
The boy sighed and picked up her huge purse that she neglected to pick up and threw the ice cream away.

Great lunch theatre, lunch theatre that almost made me throw up my lunch.

Strained Peas and wild pigs.

Max, the king, would not stop crying tonight.
I babysat him and his brother.
As I held and fed Max, Adam crawled up and sat on my lap and demanded a story.
"What kind of story?"
"The kind that has me and you and Max in it and there are cowboys!"
I proceeded to make up, on the spot, a story of epic proportions.

Spoiler alert: in the story we didn't ride horses. Adam rode a pig and Max and I rode an elephant.

As I finished the story Adam and Max both looked at me.
It is the strangest thing watching two brand new people grow up. They look at me as if I know everything, that I already have the answers or something. When Max cries about something it is the end of the world to him because that is all he knows.

Adam put his head on my shoulder and whispered, "Is Maxie asleep?"
I looked down and saw at long last he had fallen to sleep. "Yes."

and I know that I won't fall asleep until 5am.

restless is a word for it.

sitting next to a practically married couple while watching attractive people fall in love on a big screen is a sentence for it.

I have been thinking so much.


so much that my mind is blank.

guess we never had it

"Well there was that time you know, when I had a thing for you and you didn't have a thing for me and then when you had a thing for me and I didn't have a thing for you but you know it was timing right?"

I opened my mouth to reply and the lights dimmed.
I sat there in the theatre, dumbstruck, as I thought about the run-on sentence he just said.

Its not that I wasn't aware of the situation he was referring to it was the fact that I didn't know how to respond. Lately, I have been saying everything that I want to say because, why not?

That is when I realized, it was hard for me to say things to him because talking to him brought me back to the mindset of being a senior and being completely mute and not expressing what I wanted.
In retrospect, I didn't really say anything I wanted to say when I was eighteen.
Now, I'm not one for the "should haves" and "I wish I would have" but lets be real, here is what I should have said when I was eighteen. To all different people:

"You're an idiot for not wanting to be with me."
I wish I would have stayed with the other one longer.
"Don't lose yourself in her...But I know you're going to do it anyway."
I wish I would have enjoyed you while you were still on this planet.
"You ditch me for her whenever you have the chance."
I wish I wouldn't have let her.
"WHY AM I DATING YOU?"
I wish I would have picked differently.
"I don't actually like you its just nice that you like me."
I wish I wouldn't have even started that lie.
"Stop wasting everyone's time. This may not be important to you anymore but its the rest of my life."
I wish I would have sat down and explained to her what she could really do.
"You are literally one of the dumbest people I have ever encountered."
I wish I would have won a trophy for doing it my way, scratch that I DID.
"I miss you all the time but I know you don't miss me at all"
I wish I would have missed someone else instead, recognized it and acted on it.

This is what I could think of in those first moments of the black out then I leaned over to him and whispered,
"Yeah. Timing. Probably timing."

its been awhile since I've seen your face

Saw Midnight in Paris again [I may or may not be a Woody Allen junkie] but this time I did not have the sudden urge to drop everything and move to France. This time all I wanted to do was pick up everything and move back to Ashland.

This has happened to me before. Feeling physically uncomfortable because I haven't acted in a long time. It has officially been over a year since I have thrown myself into a character and I'm beginning to believe this is the cause of my illness. I'm lovesick. I need it.

Not to be dramatic or anything.

seventeen days.

alleyways and eyecontact

and then sometimes you sit in a different car with a different boy and begin to realize that maybe he was the one you should have been sitting in the car with all along.

The words came tripping out of my mouth and he grabbed my hand. Not in a romantic way, just in a way that spoke for itself.

"Why haven't we ever really talked?"
"I don't know. We should have sooner."

I just wanted to sit in that car until the sun came up and talk to him.

I am currently the happiest I've been all summer.

wooden floors and cars again

I sat staring at my steering wheel. I didn't look up at my old friend.
"It just feels like I'm breaking up with...someone." I mumbled. I glanced up and saw her confusion. "I feel disillusioned. And the weirdest part is I've felt like this only once before."

The engine rumbled and I looked down at the wheel again.
I felt the lump rising in my throat.
"It's strange because I don't know who's changed, me or them. It's just like seeing someone familiar, the person who you use to say everything to and now there is just nothing left to say."

"Sometimes there isn't anything to say."

"But I'm at peace with it. just how I was at peace with it when I realized he and I would never be us again. We grew apart."