If Winter Ends

As previously suspected, I am secretly still fifteen. Which is why last night I drove my roommate to the brink of insanity with my urgent, visceral need to listen to "Where Eagles Dare" by the Misfits. On repeat. All goddamn night. I probably fell asleep still singing it: I ain't no goddamn son of a bitch/You better think about it, baby, thinking of Paul T. last winter, "Man, I used to have the coolest Misfits shirt. I don't feel like I've had eleven beers..." He doesn't know it, but he was a star in vol. 2 of my college diaries, not because I wrote about him a lot, but because he said one or two really good things that will become central themes in some greater work. You know, if I ever write a greater work.

I've realized that all I write is short stories and shitty poetry about poor kids living in northeastern Ohio. Today in English, I wrote:

I remember the spring when they opened up the Starbucks on Euclid Ave.,
before Matt Bliss worked there,
where Kayla and I got frappuccinos for the first time
(scrounged coins from the bottoms of our lockers and under sofa cushions)
and pretended like we had money

And that was the May that I was fifteen, the month after what was, quite possibly, the worst night of my life. At least, the first worst night of my life.

The past few days have been fucked up and difficult -- a sea of final papers, bad grades, messed up accusations, and terrifying confrontations (I did not know he would be at that party, I was not expecting him to pull me off the deck and into the grass, drunk and yanking hard on my wrists and then my hair, yelling at me in that weird, quiet way -- it's not that he's loud, he just says horrible things and it's hard for me to call it anything other than yelling. I was so scared walking back to Susan's car by myself. I can't wait to leave here.)

And I guess, somehow, all of this adds up to me with my headphones on in the writing center listening to "If Winter Ends" on repeat and trying really hard to remember what life used to be like and wondering how it could have been if I had just done that one thing differently.