The Pool, and Everything That Came After

I remember, more clearly than any other memory I have of her, the day we spent at the pool. I don’t think that I have any happier memory from my time during high school. I tended to hate the summer, to hate the way it highlighted my loneliness, made me feel the utter emptiness that surrounded me. She changed all of that, made everything better, made life bearable. We drove to the pool near her house, a strange sort of outdoor lake that had been transformed, slides and all added. I had never seen anything like it, had felt overwhelmed at the beauty of something so out of place in her town.

I don’t remember what, exactly, we did the entire time we were there. I remember that every time I resurfaced from under the water I smiled, the grin on my face so wide that I couldn’t help but giggle with glee every time we met eyes. The way she splashed water at me, told me she loved me. Even thinking of it now, knowing how everything between us ended, my heart is full of joy, of bliss.

I remember Halloween, driving to my grandparents' house with her so that we could run around the neighborhood, convince everyone we were younger than we actually were and get enough candy to stuff us. The air was cold, the neighborhood dark yet inviting, despite its eeriness. I remember the drive there, everything we said to one another, the way she expressed to me that sometimes, in the back of her mind, she wondered if she was in love with me, even though she was convinced she was straight, even though she had a boyfriend. I remember the feeling in my chest, the strange contrast between wary tightness and elation. I don’t think I was ever in love with her, at least not in a romantic sense; I remember wanting to kiss her, just once, so that I could be sure. I never did, and I still don’t know if that was a good or bad decision.

I try to understand what shifted between us. Even now, I crave the time when things were good, when things were right, when we were okay and happy and the only person the other could rely on. I don’t remember the first time she began irritating me, or what she said that affected me so deeply, that made me halt in my steps. I know it was something she had never said before, something so unlike her. Maybe it was when she broke up with her boyfriend; maybe, in my mind, I wondered if that meant something for us. I had already been outed by this point, and everyone in our school assumed we were dating. I wonder if that played into it, if she got uncomfortable being around me for that reason, if she found pleasure in making jabs about my sexuality because it assured her that she didn’t feel anything more than friendship for me, if it was a way of telling me to not cross that line, to never even think about it. Maybe she was afraid of being associated with me, afraid that people would think she was like me—wrong, disgusting, laughable. Maybe she wanted to blend in with everyone else, to end any suspicions that would surely arise from this breakup. I think of the way she would mock me, the fact that, once, she dug into me so deeply that I hurt myself. That she saw the marks on me and swore she would never hurt me like that again, how she broke that promise within a week, how I began to shift from annoyance to hatred.

I’ve said before that, even when I hate, it is due to love—an antithesis is how I described it. When I began to hate her, really hate her, it hurt more than anything, hurt because I had loved her so much, because I still did. I often think about the time I woke up to a voicemail from her, the sound of her voice breaking, the way I sat in my room, in the corner where I did my makeup, and suddenly felt trapped in there, small. I wanted to run—to run from that room that was suddenly choking me, to run from her. I wanted to forgive her. I wanted to tell her that I wished we could go back to what we had, too. I miss you. I hate remembering the way it sounded when she said that, how her voice was disjointed and broken, almost unintelligible, defeat laced through all of her words. I know I told her that we couldn’t be the same, that she had hurt me beyond repair. I know I regretted it almost instantly, that I wanted her to hold me again, to lie in bed next to her during our sleepovers and to exist in her room again and to feel understood.

We had started a club together, before we fell apart. The first LGBT club for my school, something we were mocked for endlessly, something monumental. I remember how happy and elated I was to lead this with her. I remember the bitterness I began to feel when the club finally kicked off after a year and a half of planning and negotiating, how I wished more than anything that she wasn’t there. I reasoned with myself that I didn’t want her there because of the things she had said to me, the way she had made me embarrassed of who I was; she didn’t have a right to be there, I told myself, after the way she treated me. It was partly that, I think. For the most part, I wanted her gone because of the way my chest felt when I saw her, the sudden pang of loss, how my body began to shake and my mind fell back into that similar sensation of weakness, the one I always felt around her.

I look for her still, sometimes—on social media, in the posts of people from high school—when my longing for what we had, my longing to recapture those memories and clutch them tightly to me, returns. I never find much. I wonder how she is, now. I wonder if she thinks of me, if she recalls the feeling of our car rides together, if she dreams of the way we would laugh and roll down the windows and scream. If she ever remembers the times we held each other while the other sobbed, of how we were each other’s safe place, of how we made a home for one another buried within us. Does she remember what she told me that Halloween night? Has she figured out if she was in love with me that whole time?

I remember meeting her. Seeing her in freshman year for the first time, sitting at the end of the lunch table I had begun to occupy. I don’t think I knew her name until quite some time after that. She would switch around tables, only sitting with us occasionally. I remember the first time she sat closer to me, across the table and down one seat. I was nervous, closed off, unsure of how to speak to her or to anyone. We said a few words that felt strangely familiar, and I noticed the way my chest no longer ached with anxiety. The return of my anxiety when I found out that we were working behind the scenes together for our school play, how I was convinced she would hate me. The moment that I came out to her, walking down the empty halls during rehearsal, the feeling of finally opening up to someone, of being understood, of being accepted when I never thought I would be. Those halls seemed less miserable, then, felt more hopeful.

I wonder if she ever really cared for me, if she cared as much as I did about her. I wonder when, exactly, she began to grow distant, to morph into someone else that I could barely recognize. I wonder if she thinks about me still in the way that I think about her. What does she feel for me now, looking back? Does she regret the way things ended, the way she treated me? Does she hate me for leaving her behind when everything became too much for me? Does she understand where everything went wrong, does she hope that one day, maybe, we can speak once again, can meet coincidentally and start over? Does she ever speak of me to anyone, reminisce on our memories and feel a pang of sadness and happiness and longing? Or does she feel nothing, think of me as merely a blip in the timeline of her life, something to remember every once in a while before discarding the thought, pushing it away, realizing that, finally, she has forgotten my face?