The things I Do

There once was a boy. He was very very young, now it seems. The world seemed open to him in every way, but of course he didn't really know that. He wanted solitude and he wanted to feel loved and he wasn't very happy in school. He met a girl after art class, sometime, he had allowed the other kids to paint him green while he stood on a stool. The teacher watched, bemused, as he allowed it, a look of slight sadness on his face. The girl, it seemed, had been in love with him for some time, and so he told her that he loved her, but really he was scared and wished that it would be over soon. He loved her after a long long time from the tears she cried when he told her it was over.

There once was a boy. His father had died, it seemed the night before. There was a very pretty girl, with short curly wispy hair. He waited for her to return from Europe for the summer, and for a time they were happy. She didn't even know she was consoling him, and his heart was too far gone into pain and shock to reach him, and she was stuck in her own pain from a heroin dad and an overbearing mother and another unhappiness with another boy.

There once was a young man. He felt a charge when she shook his hand, and she courted his body for months while she summered on the east coast. He felt a pang when she said that he didn't seem like boyfriend material. He fell a bit in love anyway, and tried hard to forget what she had said. But in the end it came true.

There once was a young man. He saw her in the bar and was startled at her beauty. He tried and was soon succesful in her bed, although their days were filled with cigarettes and silence. He broke it off with her, she called back, and then she broke it off with him. He wrote an album named "7 songs about one girl," and she dived deep into addicition and fun. She reached the end of her rope and called him. They lived, for a time, in a limbo of love, neither happy but trying very hard to nourish the love that eventually grew. But they were cats and dogs, oil and water, car tires and rain. Where she had once dreamed of children and homes, there was only him. And where he dreamed of love and joy, there was only a sleeping girl. She left him one day in a therapists office, and he continued to dream of her, and to escape into daydreams and pain.