5/15/12

By the way
By Jessica Morrow


There’s this guy that I love. Consider guy a loose term. I don’t know whether to refer to a nineteen year old male as a man, a guy, a bloke, or even just a sentient human being from the opposite gender compatible sexually with myself.

Anyway, there’s this guy that I love.

We've only known each other for just over a year. But it’s like I’ve known him forever. I know his wants and his fears, his likes and his dislikes, his deepest darkest pages of his history. You might just look at us and go, oh not another teenage couple, but you’re wrong.

Do teenage couples deal what we’re dealing with? I highly doubt it. To some extent, I should admit it, because nobody’s ever alone in anything, even though they think so. I also know there are others because of my late night Google searches telling me history repeats itself. It just continues for generations. If we don’t fix what’s tearing us apart, things will just become worse and worse and worse until they just…explode.

Life is funny like that sometimes.

You’re going along so well – there are a few things you’d like to fix here and there, but its okay for now – and then boom, your world turns upside down.

Sorry for all my clichés, but it’s one of the few ways to illustrate a point, even if other writers just sigh and say thanks, but no thanks.

I don’t know if clichés can express my love for him. I might use one again later on, but for now, our love is unique. We are together and we are one. We know almost all about each other; much more than even a lot of married couples. You know the type that’s been married for years, and they have to lie to each other to keep the peace? The sort of lies, like credit card debt or where they’re spending their after-work hours, it’s depressing them. Their continued marriage is only continuing because of a very vague, selfish reason. Money is usually that reason.

True love doesn’t need sacks of cash. They can function just fine with the bare minimum, and a brilliant weekend needn't involved taking a luxury jet to Paris and a night out at the Hilton. It just involves being together. Whether you talk or not, it’s unimportant. It’s just basking in each other’s company. Just holding and seeing each other. There doesn't even need to be sex. Yes, you need sex in a relationship eventually, but if that’s all the relationship is, then there’s no point. The intimacy, it’s what makes everything tick. It’s what makes you truly realise you love your other half, and actually mean it. Without any added words – your high-paying job, your antics in the bedroom. Those add-ons might be lovely extras, but if you can’t just say the three words without anything added on, being together is nothing.

That brings me back to him.

I can guess you’re probably reading this and laughing at what a nineteen year old could know about love. After all, I’ve never been in a proper relationship before him. I’ve been asked out and I’ve admired others from a glance, but never anything like this. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe my first instance of love has just turned me into some lovey-dovey Valentine’s Day cut-out.

I see a cliché coming: when someone you have feelings for is on the brink of death, something clicks in you. Either you realise you truly do love them, and can’t bear the thought of life without them, or you just go ‘oh’ and realise they never were that important.

When it happened to me, the only thing that came into my head was ‘No, not him’ on a repetitive overdrive in my mind. Everything else was wordless. I just couldn’t begin to think of a world without… It just makes me sick thinking about it.

Faced with the loss of someone you love, you realise what you feel is more than skin-deep. It’s not just intimacy. You’re faced with thoughts of the two of you being together. Thoughts of the two of you being apart are just met with horror. Being with someone other than him is just unbearable. I can have celebrity crushes, peek glances at buff passersby, but he’s the one I think about being with forever. I only look at them briefly; whether it is that sexy vampire from that drama show, or the cute guy in my Lit class. They’re nothing compared to him. If anyone even tried to compare the two, it’d just get lost on me, and I’d be like ‘Bitch, please’ like that meme they have all over the internet.

I can’t wait until I see him. It’s not that long, like a day or two, but sometimes it feels like eternity. Without him, I feel like a part of me is missing. It’s like he completes me. Before I knew him, I could consider those the dark days. I may have had family and my best friend, but to have the connection I’ve had with him is something so rare not even they could have it with me. It’s like we were meant to meet, destiny told us to go to the same university and for him to make friends with the only people I knew there from high school.

Time feels like it’s going on forever. I have commitments to make up the time between our visits; work, eating, sleeping, writing. That doesn’t mean I won’t miss him. The time periods between each visit means nothing. It’s like I don’t even have to work, like wearing a uniform and serving an endless parade of snooty customers is just a very vague dream. I have to fake a smile and act like seeing that man ordering a burger meal is just the very highlight of my day. We all know it’s just a big lie, planted on top of a fancy fast food restaurant, so why continue bothering?

It's appearances which cause conflict, even, and especially, in our relationships. Other people may show affection and adoration towards the couple, but when they’re behind closed doors, they can be rather sneaky. Lies on top of lies on top of a big, fake smile, it’s just everywhere. It’s hard to fake appearances to almost everyone, whether co-worker or sibling, friend or boyfriend. Society has so many taboos, and they seep into everyday life. Why does everyone just accept these sometimes absurd norms without any questions?

Be normal, no matter the consequences.

You can only be your true self to a select few, if even that. Sometimes, people you believe to be your most trusted confidantes, eventually betray you to the social norm patrol, believing your actions to be unacceptable. Whether you have chronic depression, or a desire for a rose tattoo, someone will always see an abnormal act. That’s why the desire to locate the perfect partner is so intense, and why magazines and social media and advertisements and magazines and video games are already so desperately trying to get us with someone who is so perfect…genetically. Societal norms suggest you get with someone who has nice genetics, and his pretty and strong, and will make humans stronger than ever before. Social Darwinism, they call it. However, internally, we all want someone we don’t have to please all the time, which we can just veg out in a poncho and a hardhat watching Jersey Shore or singing out What about me in the shower at the top of our lungs, and they won’t give a damn. We can just show who we really are and they’ll accept us, because they love us. Sometimes I wish societal norms and our internal belief system would match up. It’d be nice not to be so plastic all the time. What’s the problem if someone walks around with a poncho and a hardhat; if gay Muslims get married in the Sistine Chapel wearing crosses; if couples of any race, shape or colour can just do whatever the hell they like? Granted it doesn’t involved rape, murder or any other vulgarities.

What’s all this even got to do with him? If you’ve got to ask that, it’s rather silly. I love him because of who he is. Obviously, or I’d be off gallivanting with sexy stud from Lit. I don’t care if he’s got a hairy chest, if he prefers playing Fallout than hanging out at the gym, or if he doesn’t fix the media’s stereotype for a perfect man. He may have problems worthy of their own drama TV show, but I wouldn’t mind that. It’d beat watching that vampire show with the clichéd plotlines and the love triangles. Even though he’s an amateur actor, I doubt he’d be playing himself, but that’s okay. I’d have him beside me as I watched it, and….wow, I’m getting a little ahead of myself, aren’t I?

I should end this story right about now, before it starts to turn into a Mills and Boon novel, and before you just give up on me. I guess what I’m trying to say is: there’s a guy that I love. Despite everything we’ve been through since we’ve met, my message still remains the same.

Don’t judge appearances, because sometimes they’re proven to be a load of horse manure. I can count the fingers on one hand in an instant, of people who need to heed this advice. Those people are the sort of dreary dunces who think money and taxes are the be-all and end-all of life. And then they die.

If only they realised how much they’re missing out on. If only they could be like me and him, and marvel in life in all its intricacies. To look at a man eating a zinger burger no mayo, or a quadriplegic learning to live again, and see how wonderful it all is, it’s just purely amazing.

I know that there are a lot of bad things in this world. A lot of people might call me naïve, but those are people who don’t even know my favourite colour, let alone my opinions on the world. They just go, ‘she’s a nineteen year old girl who can’t cook or drive, she must be useless’ but they don’t see what’s under the surface.

And that’s why love and intimacy can be so important. Finding someone, even one person, makes it all worthwhile. It might take a year, it might take fifty, but when you finally meet that person, you just know you’re in for the long haul with them. And I mean that in a positive way.

By the way, there’s this guy that I love.


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Jessica Morrow is an emerging writer and second year Bachelor of Arts (Professional and Creative Writing) student at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. Inspired by the works of authors such as Suzanne Collins and George Orwell, Jessica likes to strike a balance between literary and genre fiction in her writing. Hopefully, this inspires more people to read.