GIRL

Like all cheese-ball, fuckhead stories...there is always ONE.  One girl who left a mark, a fingerprint on the person i would come to be in the years following a departure of sorts.  That girl, was J.

To keep this from running to an absolutely absurd length, i'll shorten certain parts to keep it bearable.

I had been busted the final time.  Facing 5-7 years in prison at the age of 17 wasn't looking like a fucking vacation to say the least.  So needless to say, my day to day spirits weren't exactly of the "jolly" nature.  I had stopped calling my PO, and my NA sponsor [i was also mandated to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings on a daily basis.] hadn't heard from me in weeks.  So after a tortuously quiet week in school planning how i was gonna jump the train downtown and spend the weekend escaping in to the wonderfully dark and familiar hole i had dug with a needle and spoon, it was FINALLY time to break the schedule that had been set for me.

I walked out of the school door nearest the parking lot [the first and only time i had ever done this] to find my sponsor sitting on the school stairs waiting for me.  "What a fuckin prick" i said to myself staring at him in a mass of High Schoolers swimming towards their parents cars.  He politely informed me [more like forcefully dragged me to his car] we were going to an NA convention across the state line for the weekend.
Great...fucking great i thought [out loud] not only do i get to NOT GET FUCKING HIGH, but i get to spend an ENTIRE WEEKEND SURROUNDED BY SMELLY ASSHOLES LIKE YOU IN SOME DINGY HOTEL CONFERENCE ROOM WITH WALLPAPER FROM THE 80'S, SHITTY COFFEE AND VENDING MACHINE FOOD!
I made it a point to remind him of that the entire drive there...looking back on it, it was kind of ridiculous.  A grown ass human being bitching, moaning, and crying for a 3 hour drive in a shitty Saturn sedan.

After an awkward nights sleep at a relatives house, we arrived and my sponsor left me a little slack on my chain.  He was popping in and out of hotel rooms, drinking pots of rancidly black coffee...If you've never been to an NA convention - it's basically an incestuous gang bang of brainwashed adults acting like greedy, sex depraved infants...fueled by truckstop caffeine.

I sat next to the indoor pool chainsmoking and staring at the mobs of instinct-suppressed-humans throbbing around the lobby.  Then i noticed HER.
Stupidly enough, she was playing ping pong with the only other guy i recognized in this whole human zoo.  Matt.  Matt was into metal and covered in tattoos.  I sheepishly walked over and sat down on a bench next to the table, acknowledging him as i did so.
He came over after a few games with this GIRL in tow, asking if i wanted to go out to her car and listen to some metal CD's and smoke more cigarettes for a while.
I quickly gazed at the GIRL standing in front of me and was immediately awestruck.  Pink and orange hair, there must have been 20 piercings in each of her ears, various neon articles of clothing, and knee-high black platform boots.
I struggled, and eventually a quiet "yeah" slipped through my lips as i stared into her gorgeous blue eyes, blushing like a pre-teen meeting a hot babysitter.
We went outside for an hour, them in the front seat, me sitting alone in back....listening to ear piercing black metal at blood curdling volume levels, staring into the rear view mirror at this punk-goddess.  Matt eventually got bored and asked if we wanted to go inside.  She told him we'd be inside in a little while.  So we sat outside her car on the 10 foot wide strip of grass between the parking lot and the highway this hotel called a "lawn" for 6 hours talking about everything we'd been through and done, bands we liked, our friends...giggling and trying to avoid eye contact the entire time, but being too enamoured with eachother to not look up "one more time".  Literally until the sun went down.
About this time her sponsor came out and was ready to leave [she had driven them both, along with Matt], J asked her if she could give me a ride back.  She and my sponsor obliged, and we went careening down the freeway at 95 until reaching the far west suburbs of the city. [J always drove this fast...and in doing so managed to flip her, AND her father's car within a week of eachother]

I leaned over her seat from the back seat and kissed her on her cheek on the drive home.  We stared at eachother in the rearview mirror the whole way back.  I've never felt that way since.

We started a love-smitten "hang out" session that quickly turned into seeing eachother every day i could make the 45 minute drive to her house after school, rehab, and a meeting.  A week after we had met, i held her hand as she threw the last 4 syringes of Demerol into the sewer at the end of her driveway.  We colored on her walls and made out for hours.  We literally couldn't stop holding eachother.

One night on the way to an NA meeting together, she pulled in to a school parking lot and told me to get in the back seat.  We fucked on her leather seats for 2 and a half hours until both of us were so exhausted we couldn't go anymore.  The windows fogged up while our sweaty skin stuck together as we lay breathing heavily onto eachothers chests, resting for a while before heading home to tell our parents about a "great meeting".

The next 3 years of my life were spent in that general fashion.  Every waking moment i possessed i spent with J.  We did everything...we were like children discovering things for the first time again.  We went on long meaningless drives just listening to our favorite records, we walked around the city chasing eachother through the parks, we'd dress up in winter clothes in the middle of August and blow bubbles in the middle of the street.  She would paint, and i'd play guitar until dawn when we'd fall asleep holding eachother in her bed watching tank girl or some shit.  We'd wake up at 4 in the afternoon, have INCREDIBLE sex until 10:30 at night, get more tattoos, and drive to my best friends house and watch horror movies all night and talk about particle physics until the coffee shop opened in the morning.  All the while, inching through my last year of school, graduating from rehab, going to NA meetings 5 times a week, and slaving off my drug charges in community service. 
I think it's safe to say i was walking the thinnest tightrope i'd ever been on, and loving the pressure and stress of it.  Life is much more fucking exciting when your freedom is constantly being threatened.  The, "this might be the last time i feel the hot sun on my back" approach definitely gives your daily mood a little lift.

Life was fucking horribly perfect.  Then came college.

I never had any inclination to go at all, but J's parents were rich and hell bent on her not only GOING to college, but succeeding. [and they made it very clear they "didn't want her to be with me...AT ALL"....i quote]  And when i say rich, i mean RICH.  Like 3 Audi's, 2 lawyers, 1 Son preparing for the bar-exam, and an ex-drug addict punk/artist/rebel Daughter RICH.  Picture perfect suburb, right?

And that's kind of where it ended.  She fought her parents for show...to make it look like she cared about me, and wanted to stay.  But behind closed doors, she accepted their money.  She was too scared to fight for the life we had dreamed of in California.  Didn't want to put in the effort, and bailed on me.
She took her parents money, bought a bunch of china white [a mutual friend of ours informed me a few weeks after our split she was "back on the shit"] and ran off to art school in Los Angeles....our plan in the first place.

Not a lot of closure to that story huh?  That's how i feel too.  It still keeps me up every few weeks, thinking about her, where she is, what she's like.

That is my GIRL story.  The one that fucked me up real good.  For weeks i slept all day, i was scratching my self until i'd bleed, and my arms and legs were covered with finger-wide lesions that stung like hell when i'd get in the shower, stick to my clothes - and the scabs would have to be peeled away every morning after i woke up.

I will never understand why things wound up that way, or how a person could be so lazy to just "give up on a dream"...It's actually a pretty large flaw i have.  I've yelled and screamed at friends of mine for settling for less than they dreamed of as a child.  I just don't get it.

I just don't get it.