Richter

Wanna know my real impulse? Wanna know what I'm really feeling? What you're doing to me?

I want to give you the best kiss I've ever given anyone. Seriously. Raise the hair on your neck.

And then I wanna get away as fast as I can. Quit school, maybe get some money back. Move to Seattle, hide there. Work a job for a while. Maybe pay off my loans (I said this was what I really wanted to do, yeah?). And then take all that money and move to Iceland, where it's okay to be pale and there are geysers and fjords and glaciers and a beautiful language and some of the best music in the world. I will exercise until I barely have a chest and I will make sure there is a great venue for swing dancing somewhere in Reykjavík and I will add my mother's first name to my middle name and change my last name so it fits their naming system ("Jeffreysdottir"? That may need some tweaking...) and I will find a dashing Icelandic man and we will make love in one of the outdoor geothermal pools and we'll fall in love and I will love it there and I'll somehow make millions and fly my family and friends out for visits all the time and I will watch that damn sun rise over the Norwegian Sea. I might have to learn how to like fish a lot more, but it's a small price to pay for having the continental U.S. and the Mighty Atlantic between us.

Oh, and I know that's beyond cowardly (and highly fanciful). But even if you liked that kiss, you'd resist temptation to move beyond that moment and just go find yourself a nicer girl who sings gajillions of songs from musicals and is a good girl for Christ. And speaking of Christ, I think I just wiped a bit of venom from the corner of my mouth.

It's not that there's any other specific person in the way of me getting to you, although there are plenty of eager candidates, I'm sure. There is nothing, no one, getting in the way of me getting to you except you and me. I can't want an answer anymore, because you would, you would veer off, you know you would, you already have at what you thought were warning signs. I can't want you because I get the feeling you can't want me.

I'm beyond the point of even thinking the positive scenario would play out in real life. I'm at the point in this earthquake where I'm so afraid of getting crushed by pieces of falling ceiling that I can't even move to curl up in a fetal position. The floors will fall out from under me and I will miss the triangle of life and something will crush me, but I will not move, because haven't you ever almost hit a deer with your car? Those things don't move 'til it's too late half of the time. Eyes in the headlights.

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I saw emotional hell when I arrived home tonight. I saw one girl completely disheveled because the man she was sure she would marry had run off and left a note saying it was over. I saw another girl pacing and declaring that she would kill the same man should he ever show his face again. I saw an earthquake in progress.

And because my freaking empathy-meter-thing is so strong, liking you seems pointless. Slightly complaining about it to my friends gets me statements like, "You're cute." I'm not cute. I'm back to being pathetic, and near desperate. I'm back to focusing on the fact that I'm not in a relationship (although everyone in this department seems to be breaking it off these days) instead of what I should be focusing on, which is doing well in school, getting a job, and making enough money to get by.

I'm gonna watch you kiss another girl for our final tomorrow and I'm going to wish it was me, as cliché as that is. And you're going to watch me kiss another guy and wonder when our scene is ever going to end. And then there will be hours afterward filled with stuff I have to get done, and then I get to go home early. And I'll get a week away from you, and it will be either one of two things: painful or refreshing. And I will arrive home over a week later, and I'll walk into my first class with you, and that moment will be one of two things: agony or a relief. And our relationship will either be strained or it will be a nice friendship. And that's how it will be and it will not be complicated because if it gets even a little complex I will Kabuki-kick you in the solar plexus and leave it at that.

Barf. I should really crank out that critique, since I'm on a writing roll here.