A True Story

i believe i have reached some sort of breakthrough, or maybe i have finally accepted my inevitable defeat. This isn't exactly a sad sort of thing; there will be no elegy, no Black Parade. Nor is this an event to celebrated with revelry and symphonies. This is a mixture, an emulsion, if you will. It's a combination of every spiteful and grateful feeling that one could possibly conceive. It's life at its most exuberant, pitiful, awesome, and terrible state. "How can this be?" you may wonder, puzzled by my lack of a coherent description of the current climate of my emotional condition. So, i will attempt to explain myself.

Last week, i discovered that my class council had enlisted me to participate in my senior class spirit week skit--the one chance that any one grade level has to express its creativity and rambunctious school pride fervor in front of the entire student body. Though i have attended my school since the 7th grade, i never once partook in this festivity. The idea of adopting school pride and class spirit for a week seemed too strenuous for me, since i would much rather sit in the bleachers of the gymnasium and contemplate the futility of my high school experience. A skeptic and pessimist at heart, i was never one for leading my class in some sort of jubilant display of unity. Nor was i ever one who cared about such things. So learning of my role as a dancer in the skit was far from a joyous experience. However, the idea became suddenly much less appealing upon learning that i was to dance with a partner. And the idea became a nightmare upon learning the identity of this partner--my 7th grade crush. Now, you may wonder, "What does it matter to you if you have to dance with your 7th grade crush? That was 7th grade!" If i were at all a normal, functioning human being, i would say, "Hey, Soul Sister! You're right! That was soooooo 7th grade!" However, as you might be able to infer from above statement, i am far from normal or functioning. Rather, i am some unpredicted blip upon the face of human existence. It appears that my emotion modulator broke in the midst of my creation and now i am completely insane. My modulator is so far gone that i cannot move on from a crush i've had since the 7th grade. My modulator has forced me to have this overly prolonged sense of affection for his skinny, pale, Asian shell. So here i am in homecoming week, forced to twist and shout with the Seoul of Korea, from whom i've been unable to detach and destroy any feelings of awkward teenage attraction for the past six years. This may just be my inner drama queen speaking, hoping to invoke pity from her beloved audience. This may be a true evaluation, but as a self-proclaimed queen of drama, i must do this. i simply cannot bear the thought of keeping this to myself.

Anyway, today was our first rehearsal together for the dance. Afraid of this moment for the past week, i refrained from looking at him and even refrained from touching him, which proved to be difficult since the dance involved such things as hand-holding and turning and other horrifying dance-y movements. As we practiced, we uttered no words, since we don't usually talk. We have talked before, but only on such occasions when he was invisibly held at gun point, or when he was about to die from his overwhelming desire to discuss the nature of VSEPR geometry and solubility rules with another prisoner of college-level Chemistry, lest he fail an exam. So, like normal, we shared in no conversation and didn't even look at each other. Rather than holding my hands, he held my wrists, as if holding my hands would mean sudden death, since my hands are inconveniently like kryptonite to his fragile seoul. To protect his home country and his own well being, he only held my wrists to maintain his superpower--his unbelievably cute, charming nature. Though he looked miserable and pained while having to sacrifice his security for the sake of a hopeful senior class victory by dancing with me, his mastery of his superpower seemed unfazed.

The revelation i stumbled upon may not really be anything at all like an epiphany. i have simply come to admit something to myself, something that i could not admit earlier. When my friends who know of my modulator condition asked me how the dance was, i acted as if it was awful, as if it was terribly awkward to dance with him and that i wished for nothing more than to graduate with another class who has no recollection of this mortifying event. i really did feel those things with the utmost sincerity, but i refused to admit to myself that it hurt. i wanted to merely act like it hurt and say that it hurt; i didn't want to feel it. i tried to ignore these feelings and then while i was studying the relative strengths and weaknesses of Bronsted-Lowry acids and bases, i realized that it hurt. That it hurt a lot. That it hurt a lot to have always been shy around the Spirit of Seoul and to have the culmination of all those years of clandestine affection be exposed to the whole school in this scary twist of fate. Even worse, exposed to SeoulBoy himself. i hate the thought that after all these years, it ends like this--with me being so frightened of holding his hand in a dance that means absolutely nothing to anyone, with me being so close to him and yet unable to say or do anything that could change the way things are. It's been like this since it started, but it's hard to let go. i tried hard to convince myself that my Seoul ship had sailed long ago, but now, my pitiful denial seems to be laughing at me, telling me that there was no way that such a thing would ever change. i know that's not true and now i know that it hurts. A lot. But i feel okay now because at least i've acknowledged the pain. Because i know it's there, i know that i can find help for it and that one day, it will heal. These things take time and i've got time on my hands.