day118 - magnolia
you've been thinking about returning to writing in the second person, it feels less confessional, and it makes sense to you why pta made magnolia perhaps to deal with his father's death. it must have been so comforting to compartmentalise yourself like that.
when Jesse was a young girl, maybe sixteen, she fell in love with her friend. not her best friend, nothing so theatrical, just her friend. in retrospect, it wasn't really love, and her friend Mara was a cruel person who flaunted her intelligence to make others feel small. but that didn't matter at the time.
Mara was dating another friend of Jesse's whom she was also very fond of. She remembers confessing to them both and saying "I don't understand why we can't all be together". That is how Jesse discovered the emotional reality of polyamory at sixteen years old.
Three years prior, she dated her first boyfriend. It ended because they didn't have much in common, really, but also because Jesse had feelings for another boy.
A year after that, shortly into her relationship with the aforementioned "other boy", she felt the dread seep in as she realised she looked forward to History and English every week, because it meant sitting next to Her.
She felt like the picture of that World War 2 bomber with all the bullet holes through it. Jesse thought she was broken or fickle, or greedy. that her endless "grass is greener" mentality would topple every relationship in her life from now onward. She was fourteen.
you used to Google "How to stop being annoying" in fits of tears when your friends would accuse you of that cardinal sin and use it to justify your ostracism. All you ever wanted was to please everybody. Class Clown? you were the boy who wore a skirt to school, whose corroded brain has blocked out all the jeers and quiet cruelty you received in the halls of your high school. It felt like comedy was the only thing to deflect from your awkward, public, highly visible transition. If you give them something to laugh about, you don't have to be the joke
Mara thinks it's not right to have this many enemies at 24. she looks at her close friends and plays the wretched game of "how many of you did I meet less than a year ago?". All of them. Every year a new implosion of some kind: a long standing relationship swept away with friends caught in the tidal wave. Her mother tells her she's trying her best. Her new friends do, too. Mara knows if she believes them too hard it'll all crumble, because she's not a person. she's a printer test page low on toner. she's a vampire, or less sexy, she's a woodchipper— her only function is destructive.
Mara hasn't talked to Jesse for close to ten years now, but she thinks about her often. She regrets how arrogant she was. Jesse haunts her at night along with the dozen other faces unfortunate enough to have found themselves caught in her metal teeth. She would reach out and make amends, it would be the sensible thing to do, but the further back the pain goes, the deeper the ache burrows. Try to dislodge it, and you find you've chased it through more tissue.
She dreams of taking her life in apology for the pain she has caused. selfishly, she would no longer have to bear the burden of guilt incurred by hurting her loved ones. but maybe the guilt is the entire point.
while the cards aren't stacked against you, you begin to accumulate goodwill and kindness from your new friends. It is the sharp sigh of a firing squad pausing to reload.
she will find new ways to prove that she can be okay.