Pink Flamingos

Solitude

Charles Bukowski once said, “Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.” Those words echoed in my soul.

When I was alone, inside, trying to simply be on my own, I thought I was going mad. It was only when I went outside to be part of the world, and all I wanted was to go back home, that I realized I really was.

“This is not how girls my age should behave,” I said to myself while lying lifelessly on my bed, looking up at the manmade stars. And really, it was true. I should have been partying and laughing and kissing. Or at the very least, going outside and sitting in the sun.

But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I stayed inside my room and wondered what the hell I was doing with my life. I read and spoke to myself and only emerged from my isolation for meals.

I was certain that I was worrying Mama Chelsea and Mama Heather, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to care. It wasn’t that serious. They’ll get over it, I told myself, they’ve got better things to do than worry about me.

The thing that made me feel the worst was that I couldn’t even write.

The words wouldn’t come. I opened my notebook and stared at an empty page before closing it again. That process was repeated every day at least three times. No matter what I did, I simply had nothing to say. The scary thing was that I was beginning to realize that really, it had always been that way.

Apart from writing, I really wasn’t good at anything.

When I was a kid, I was incredible – I could accomplish anything. I had vague memories of being a wonderful skier, one that could enter in competitions and bring home trophies bigger than my head.

I used to be fearless.

The cold didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t feel it beneath all my layers, and my excitement made me forget all my troubles anyway. I would stand perfectly still and try to catch snowflakes on the tip of my tongue while I waited in line for the chairlift.

The world was pure beneath me. The mountains were covered by a plush, white blanket, ready to catch me and cushion me if I fell. No matter where I looked, it was endless.

The higher I went up the mountain, the more excited I was. I would zip down as fast as I could, cutting a path for those behind me who couldn’t quite keep up, darting through patches of trees and allowing myself to slow down, laughing, in the powder snow. The closer I was to the edge of the mountain, the wider my smile was.

It was fun to almost fall off. I would imagine myself sliding off and drifting down delicately like one of the snowflakes and landing beneath the trees and making a snow angel. I thought it would be peaceful. I thought I could never die.

When I was eleven, everything changed. I stood in the line for the chairlift and felt the cold sink into my bones and weigh me down, as though I myself was buried under the snowfall. I couldn’t stop shivering,

The further we went up, the more my fear grew. All the excitement and accomplishment I once felt slipped away in one dull moment. I couldn’t hold onto it. It landed in my hands like snow and melted away.

My face was stinging at the top of my mountain and it felt like my eyes were going to pop out of my skull and roll down the slope. My ski instructor was a bright yellow dot in the distance ahead of me.

I thought of how my father died in a plane crash only years earlier – falling from an incredible height and crashing down, his life leaving him in one swift moment. It was really that easy. Everyone had to go eventually.

For the first time in my life, I couldn’t stop thinking that if I tried to go down on my skis, across the moguls and down the slope, I would fall and shatter my fragile bones. I could tumble off the side of the mountain and never be seen again. I could get buried alive under a snowdrift.

For the first time in my life, I realized that I was going to die. I could be in an intense amount of pain at any moment. I really could kill myself. Whether I was trying to or not.

The instructor was ahead of me. He was yelling at me but I couldn’t hear him. I knew that I had to go down the mountain one way or another – there was no other way to get to the bottom. But I couldn’t move.

All I could think about was how badly I didn’t want to let him down. He was so handsome and experienced and so much like my father, who died and I didn’t want him to be disappointed in me. I can’t stand anyone being disappointed in me. But I just couldn’t get down the mountain.

Eventually, I suppose I must have made myself move. I couldn’t remember what came next, or how I conquered myself. All I remember is that that was the last time I ever went skiing.

Instead, I sweated out my inadequacies in the Nevada heat.

I used to be bright as anything but as I grew up, and I fell and faded like a distant dying star. It happens to everyone, I told myself. It’s just that it happened to me too soon.

The more you try to avoid something, the more it comes around again to smack you in the back, leaving you breathless and winded. You can never truly push a thought away. They’ll just bounce against the edges of your skull until they fall out eventually, like a game of pinball. It was never very much fun.

I didn’t quite know why Eddie kissing me had such a dreadful effect on me. It just made my stomach turn. I was more nervous about my existence than ever.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to – it wasn’t that at all. As much as I hated to admit it to myself, I had imagined what it would feel like before. So if a dream came true, why did I have to worry about reality at all?

It was my second adventure, after the party Barbara invited me to. The problem was that it wasn’t just the fear that was overwhelming me – it was self-hatred. I knew that grand adventurers would kiss freely without a care in the world, even if they deeply cared more than anything.

But all his little kisses caught on the edge of my heart like fishhooks. Whether he intended to or not, he pushed and pulled my emotions in every direction. I just couldn’t escape from him.

Every time I tried to run away from something, I only ever ran in a circle and bumped into it again in the end. Nothing ever changed, and I knew that it wasn’t about to. I was the unlucky one – all I had to do was accept it.

I felt like a real person when I was kissing Eddie – or rather, when he was kissing me (after all, hadn’t I simply sat there and done nothing? It was his kiss, so he could do the work). In that moment, I knew that what I was thinking and feeling would have an actual impact in the world, even if it was only on one person.

There was nowhere left to disappear to. I could make him or break him entirely. Either one would be easy, but both would make me feel awful in the end. I’ve learnt that love, and the rejection of it, lead to the same place – sadness and regret.

Because you could say no at the start or you could say no later, but either way it would all end up as one big, fat no. Everything is heaven and then all of a sudden you can’t stand them even touching you or breathing your air. It all falls apart no matter what you do.

In a way, the confusion was sweeter than anything. With clarity came a time for decision making and I simply didn’t have the answers. At least as I laid there in my bedroom, I wasn’t expected to. I could carry on being miserable and muddled and above all, unreal.

No one could see me, so I wasn’t even a person. No one could question me or judge me, aside from myself of course. But that hardly even counted because I’ve lived with myself my whole life – the evil that you know is always the safer option.

I wondered what Eddie had been feeling and thinking since our kiss. He didn’t go outside as often either. Sometimes I would crawl to the window and peek through the curtains, just to check up on him. When he was outside, everything seemed to be the same, except for the fact that he was playing the Springsteen record he bought for me more often.

The idea of hurting him was as enticing as it was upsetting. From the start, he had appeared to me as player – he wasn’t respectful, he called me names I didn’t like, he wouldn’t leave me alone when I wanted to be. Beating him at his own game would have definitely been a nice end to our story. But I had grown genuinely fond of him and he seemed sincere and honest despite it all.

I was acutely aware that my skin hadn’t seen the sunlight in a week. That meant that I had wasted an entire week of summer moping and mourning when I was meant to be living it up as a teenager.

“Oh, well,” I said to myself. “Don’t be sad. It’s business as usual, isn’t it?”

I was missing the taste of jersey caramels and I was almost forgetting what Vegas looked like from the city limits. I was missing my new friends and I wanted to party again. Above all, I was missing Eddie – the way he made me laugh, the way he made me feel content and the way his lips felt on mine.

“Stupid, stupid girl,” I said to myself with a groan. “He understands you and he misunderstands you. It wouldn’t work anyway.”

The tragic thing was that I was right, but I probably wasn’t going to listen to myself anyway. My heart and mind were having a constant battle for my intentions and my actions. I wasn’t sure which one was the victor. All I knew was that, no matter what, it was a losing battle for myself as a whole.

I couldn’t let go of what he said about dying. It made sense but it couldn’t possibly be right. I desperately wanted there to be more to a person than an electrically charged lump controlling a pillar of flesh. There was a soul inside a person that made them think and feel and that meant that there was more to everything.

I knew that because I never stopped thinking and feeling and surely that couldn’t be put down to science. The very thought that we were really that simple was depressing. It made me never want to get up again.

If there was only one life for each of us, I was wasting mine. It felt like I was living inside an hourglass, half run out, the sand pouring over me as I disappeared beneath the dunes.

Making the sudden decision to live my potentially only life to the fullest should have been easy. But I laid there in bed thinking about all those possibilities and options and how many twists and turns and forks there were in the road ahead of me and I only felt overwhelmed.

There were so many options and decisions to be made and I was only one person. I could start my life and run out the door and kiss Eddie and go to Vegas and party every night and never look back. But it was much easier to think about it than actually do it.

There was nothing for me to do except lay in bed.