First Love(s)

Day 2 of my 30-day writing challenge: First Love.

Mark Mitchell was the cutest boy I had ever seen—floppy sandy brown hair and squinty eyes. In my memory he looks like a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I sat next to him for several weeks at the start of fourth grade and promptly forgot how to breathe. I had to retrain myself—in through the nose, out through the mouth, steady and even, not too deep, not too shallow. Sometimes I would feel myself start to hyperventilate when he sat next to me and would have to hold my breath in for a moment to regulate it.

Mark Mitchell wasn’t very smart, not because he wasn’t smart, but just because he couldn’t be bothered with being smart. He had more important things to do, like carve his name into the desk with his pencil and sneak candy in past the teacher. He was too busy being interesting to be smart.

I was smart. I was not interesting.

He was the first boy I combined my name with. I would fill pages—Hollie Mitchell, Hollie Christine Mitchell, Hollie Christine McLellan-Mitchell—all enshrined in hearts with arrows. Then I would carefully tear the pages from the notebook, ball up the paper, and throw them away.

One of these discarded pages found its way to my brother who found his way to Mark Mitchell, which wasn’t hard in our small neighborhood. A short bike ride, a friend of a friend, everyone was connected.

He came to my house one brilliant, warm Saturday while I was sitting in my second-story bedroom window, watching the world go by.

He came on his bike with his friends and my brother and my brother’s friends and looked up at me.

He rode onto the green grass, balanced his Huffy with one hand, and looked up at my bare feet hanging down. I wasn’t yet totally convinced I had fat legs at that point in my life, but the thought was beginning to form like an itch in my mind—there was something about my legs I wasn’t supposed to like.

He looked up at me and my legs that definitely had something wrong with them, his eyes squinting even more than they usually did because of the sun.

He looked up at me with one hand on his hip and said, “I don’t like you. Okay.”

He got on his bike and pedaled away as an icy cold shot through my heart and down into my stomach. My brother and the other boys made no attempt to hide their laughter.

I had no choice then, I went straight from liking him to falling head over heels in love with him. The pain of loving him was so achingly pleasant, the melancholy so comfortable, like a gift I never knew I wanted. I swam in that grief.

I loved him for so long, maybe even weeks, until I realized that Logan Garrett, the tallest boy in the fourth grade with silky black hair and deep brooding eyes that seemed to know some secret I would never know, was actually the cutest boy I’d ever seen.

Memories

I've been having a hard time getting my fingers typing lately, so I decided to do a 30 day writing challenge. Of course, it's May 6th and I'm just getting my first one finished, so it's safe to say this 30 day writing challenge is going to be done Hollie-Sessoms-Style, i.e. it'll be awesome if I get half a dozen completed.

My Earliest Memory

Memories are funny little things. They warp and change with time, become fuzzy and then sharpen in an instant. First memories are even trickier. Memories before I had language feel more like dreams, like movies of someone else’s life. I don’t trust these early memories. I didn’t own the words for the things that surrounded me, so they come off feeling false.

I remember a house and a big wicker chair. I really liked that chair. I think I wanted to sit in it but wasn’t allowed. I remember a dog as large as me, his tongue licking my face, but we never owned a dog. Maybe the dog was really made of wicker. Maybe I licked his face. I remember a big piece of cement in the courtyard, painted yellow with something protruding from the middle. A fire hydrant, perhaps? I would climb on it, feeling tall. It was my playground. I was cold. I lived in Alaska at the time, but didn’t know that then.

I remember Wonder Woman Underoos and a comic book. My brother and I drizzling syrup on it for absolutely no reason. Laughing, feeling naughty and exhilarated, not afraid of punishment. Not afraid of anything, yet. Did it really happen?

I remember a box of laundry detergent falling down the basement stairs, spilling the white soap crystals everywhere. Or did someone tell me that story? Did I create that image out of thin air? Was it something that happened to someone else entirely?

My early memories feel as true as the fiction I create. I don’t trust either one of them, but I’m no less grateful for them. Stories heal and fracture, entertain and help us to understand. We craft our own stories about our lives. Unless you’re a Kardashian and have your every moment recorded, you have to create a sort of fiction for your life, believe whatever you want to about your past.

The past is as pliable as the future, you just have to know what to remember and what is best forgotten.

I always fall in love with my hair, like really love it just the way it is, the day before I have a haircut scheduled. I wonder if this speaks volumes about me. I love the thing that is about to change. I love it more the second before it leaves my fingers.

The last note of my favorite song, the last fall leaf hanging on a tree, the twinkling space of time right before someone I love boards a plane and flies away from me. I love these moments harder than any that came before.

But maybe it was just the wind today. The way it seized my hair up and away, around my head and back again so that when I walked in the front door and glimpsed myself in the mirror, my hair lay perfectly haphazard, wild as a barbarian, one blonde piece falling in my face, the rest in a mess about my shoulders.

Maybe, I just love a mess.