i miss the boy that taught me to swear

i miss the boy that taught me to swear. i never realized how important he was in my life, the reasons that i felt drawn to be just like him or how influential he actually was in my development.

i was a tomboy because i didn't really know how to be girly, and the girls my age wouldn't have accepted me anyways. and i got sick of the feminine games. (i use feminine in the derogatory here.)

i was smart, really smart. and i talked like it. now, let me explain that being smart in my hometown, in my school, was the biggest curse imaginable. intelligence was treated as something socially shameful.

so what did i do? i "dumbed down" my vocabulary. i stopped trying so hard. i was always a messy procrastinator, and i just stopped trying in all but my English class, where my teacher made learning fun and interesting.

ironically, the boy who taught me to swear, the bad boy, was in my English class. we were all surprised to discover that he was probably the best student in the highest English class, and i was even more shocked that he adjusted to that achievement and somehow made it seem cool. and then something happened, and he changed back to the bad boy who didn't want to be smart, who only wanted to play basketball and football.

i learned no-fouls and a foul mouth around the same time. this boy taught me the words that still linger in my mouth at inopportune times today, gave me the beginnings of the chip on my shoulder and the need to prove myself, but enough rebellion to never care long enough to really attempt to get my act together again academically. suffice it to say, i was one tough middle-school girl with a nasty temper and an even worse vocabulary.

oh yeah, and i became a tomboy.

i could be a bad-ass in a game of no fouls with the neighborhood guys, instead of being the smart, nerdy kid. i could trash talk better than almost anyone (and i will forever regret ganging up on a guy a year older than me who wasn't so great in the come-backs department). i didn't need to go carry a message from one person to the next about who wanted to date whom, and i didn't have to get treated like dirt (unless the cousins were there, and then i left).

around the time i went through this phase, my friend and i both went through some family problems. his world was torn apart, and i became responsible for holding my family's world together, at least emotionally. his group of bad-boy friends grew in number, and the school-year posse didn't approve of the nerdy girl.

and then there was one of the biggest embarrassments of my life, which i won't go into details about here. it wasn't so bad once, but a full year of it . . . a lot of which was started and made worse by my "best friend" . . . it was terrible. i couldn't show my face anywhere without being publicly humiliated.

so he became a coward, and i became bitter and angry with the world. both of us just fell into our self-defenses. i didn't realize it was just a typical middle school response at the time.

after that, i was always the nerdy girl, but i tried to deny it by staying angry and moving from group to group before i could form any truly close bonds with anyone or get defined as part of that group. my old friend turned to sex, drugs, and alcohol. and a little skateboarding, too.

we didn't talk for three years. it would have been longer, except that we had a class together, and his best friend and i were good at having fun in class when it wasn't exactly time to have fun. . . . in an ironic twist, i no longer knew my friend except through this other guy, but there was still an awkward, unspoken history between us. i think he was relieved when the semester ended.

the next and last conversation we had was a surprising, awkward conversation that was followed by a brotherly act that surprised me even more, and then nothing. the next week, i realized that it was apparently socially unacceptable for us to talk again. we haven't talked since.

i asked his mom about him a couple of times when i drove back for my brother's football games. she actually grabbed my arm when she said he was "doing a lot better now, a LOT better." 

so i guess that's good. i hope he's still doing well. i know he's had some hard knocks again in the past few years since high school.

but i've been missing my friend since sixth grade, minus the awkwardness and emotions that destroyed our friendship, please. i miss the brother that i cried with, learned with, sometimes hated, sometimes bossed around, the idiot that taught me how to rollerblade but forgot to teach me how to stop (which is just pretty darn paradoxical and made for some hilarious times at the skating rink). . . . i doubt that guy is still around now, but maybe it's time to man up and give whomever-he-is-now a call.

MUSIC: "Someone Else's Arms" - Mae

MOOD: procrastinating

LOCATION: back in the 101