Typical Teenybopper

“I’m 18 years old and my name is Chris. Sounds typical enough, right? You may as well finish the story yourself. It’s not like you don’t meet a million people like me every day. But there always has to be a twist to every story, and here you have it – a young preppy, girlie-girl blonde with an androgynous name. It kinda changes things a bit, doesn’t it? 

I have a love and obsession, of course. Don’t we all? His name is Steve. What a hunny. It always sounds strange when we are mentioned as a couple, though. ‘Steve and Chris.’ We sound like the poster children for those pathetic, unknowingly evil faggots the fundamentalists love to pick on. ‘It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve… or Steve’s fuck-on-the-side, Chris…’ But I digress… I tend to digress often…

Sometimes I wonder if others like me think the way I do. I can’t think in trite terms for very long; sometimes every thought winds down in a spiral to resemble some strange monster that nobody likes, everyone fears, but is intriguing nonetheless. No, I am not a nerd. I can’t do anything superlatively well. I’m just average. I know what you’re thinking. ‘Not another teen LOSER.’ My ass is okay, just stare-able. My grades aren’t bad. I could do better if I wanted to. My cheerleading is loud and buoyant, but we don’t win medals. And here I am talking to you…And you know exactly why. But yet you don’t know. Nobody knows.

It seems as though suicide and depression is a pandemic extending throughout suburbia. I guess we just have nothing better to do. There are only so many football games we can scream at, so many band concerts we can sit through, so many goody-goody school events to sponsor. The place is beautiful, but the young are so accustomed that the tree-lined roads and seemingly vast fields just don’t incite quite as much peacefulness and fulfillment as it once did for those escaping from the skyscrapers surrounding them like prison bars. The bright sun smiling radiantly through the bluest of skies contrasting with the purest of green leaves should lift our moods to those heavenly heights. I think it just seems to bring some people down. Like if we are miserable, the angels should be miserable as well, and rain down on us in a ubiquitous pity-party. 

Why do you think I tried to end it all? Isn’t Steve enough of a reason? Doesn’t everyone fuck up her life because of a lover? Steve didn’t even leave me. He doesn’t hate me. Our relationship is okay. I don’t know why I freak out sometimes. But Steve is my life. Nobody knows yet, but Steve took my virginity. Two weeks later we made love again. It was beautiful, like everyone with a good experience says it is. Even those I know who were burned as children acknowledge the bliss of their first time with someone they love. I was not burned. So I lacked inhibitions with Steve. Their was no reason to hold back in that little room on Long Island Sound. The lighthouse light was not too far away, despite our distance from Montauk Point. The sun was just beginning to rise; the seagulls were just beginning to awaken and call for their breakfast on the Sound. When Steve kissed me, I heard the music in our breath. When Steve touched me, I felt the chills on the water creep in, tickle my back, and get pushed back outside by Steve’s warm gentle strokes. When Steve explored the deepest labyrinths of my body, those closest he could ever possibly come to touching my actual heart inside, I was alive and on another phase of existence. If birth brings cold, life brings pain, and death brings suffering, I was not quite stuck within true existence. It was reality in its most false state.

I know it’s not normal to feel this way. At least, the books must say it’s not. But after the sex, I wanted to kill myself. Life was losing its relevance. And somehow I must have reasoned that getting that close to Steve led the inevitability that the only place to go next was away. I tried. I couldn’t. It seemed wrong to commit such a sin on holy ground. We got back home to good old suburbia. We had sex again. Afterwards I went outside. It was an eerie fall day – the kind where the sun doesn’t simply shine, it glows, twinkles, sparkles, and attempts to induce the same within one’s spirit. I guess pretty blondes stand out in traffic. The motorists refused to run me down. Someone must have called the cops. I ran away. Steve had gone home. I played that popular suburban-girl game. I think that’s all that’s in my charts, and the only reason I ended up here. Those bloodstains streaking my the sleeves of my GAP shirt really stand out.

I know I won’t do that again. I know I hurt people in hurting myself. I know I have better things to do. I don’t know why I let things get to me. Our kind is not supposed to be sensitive in reality. Just in show. We’re too airheaded to feel, right?

I don’t know what I’ll do next. Or how I can replace the issues with normalcy. But life is more important than it seems. It just baffles the mind like a math problem just slightly too complex, and though you know the formula, adding the fractions throws you off a bit. I will try to get over it….

Oh yeah, maybe this is worth mentioning after all. About Steve… he’s not… well… that’s not really Steve’s name. It’s Stevie… She was named after Stevie Nicks…”

I finished, noting how Dr. Volk nodded impassively in that typical feigned “understanding” psychiatrist manner, writing furiously on her notepad. I had opened up because of an odd speculation that a female shrink may be slightly more sensitive to a girl’s emotions than would a man. As I slammed her door behind me in bitter disappointment directed more at my stupid idea than at Dr. Volk herself, I assumed that I was an isolated incident, a misfit incarnated in the absolute wrong body. Five years later, the doctor herself kindly offered me a ride home from the gay bar in which I completely trashed myself after a trivial argument with my lover. She held the hand of a long-haired beauty her age whom she introduced as her wife. I don’t think she recognized me.