12-13-06

I started to write the video store clerk a letter as well, although I didn’t know his name so I addressed it to, “The boy I have loved ever since I moved into this crappy, shithole, no-future-whatsoever-in-store-for-me-here town,” and I meant it completely. I had decided early on that I would agree to have sex with Mr. Clarke, if he ever asked, I would do it in a heartbeat, I’d do it doggy-style, if that was his prerogative. As for the Hanson brothers, I’d have no problem jacking all three of them off simultaneously, and if they were into kinky shit, I’d oblige that too, nipple clamps, stiletto heels, laying out on the beach, the whole nine yards, hard-core porno style and everything.
I had no trouble imaging these scenarios and mentioned my willingness to do them in my letters, with some edits. (I ended up including the three handjobs at once thing, but omitted the bit about nipple clamps, and I was too chicken-shit to write the word ‘doggy-style’ in a letter to one of my favorite teachers, but I did implore him to come back to new York and have sex with in his car, or any other discreet location.) Of course, at the time when I was writing these letters, the most experience I had ever had was kissing my ninth-grade boyfriend, who drew X’s on his wrists every morning before going to work with magic marker, and when the jocks slapped him in the hallway and said, “You probably die of ink poisoning before you get around to committing suicide,” (which I found to be an unusually astute observation for that crowd), on the cheek, outside of Computer Science class, and the second thing of significance was the time when I ripped my hand away from his when he had tried to put it over his hard-one during Chasing Amy. We broke up shortly after that. He was a fucking perv.
My fantasies of the video store clerk were entirely pure. I counted the number of times he smiled at me when I in the store, and sometimes I lurked and watched out of the corner of my eye the number of times he smiled at the other girls in the store. One time, I counted seven smiles and I was so very happy because seven was a lucky number, and I also happened to like its shape very much. In fact, I was so happy that I shouted “I love him, I really really love him,” in my room and my mom ran in and asked me why I was shouting when other people were trying to sleep and I was too embarrassed to tell her so we got into an argument instead and we made each other cry.
She asked me, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, of course I am. Now get out, would you? How would you like it if I ran into your room whenever I felt like it without asking, or knocking first?”
“You disrupt the things I do all the time. Also, please don’t forget that I’m also your mother.”
“That doesn’t take away my right to a little bit of privacy.”
“A little bit of privacy? Look at you. You’re a spoiled brat. You have this entire room to yourself, we give you an allowance every week, you get to lock this door whenever you want, and then when dinner’s ready, you get to come down and eat and then you come back up to your room and ignore your family. Look at how much you have, and you’re still whining.”
“And look how self-absorbed you are, mom. You never even try to listen or understand the things I say—”
“Don’t talk to your mom like that.” When my mom said that, I always knew that we were headed for a bad turn. It usually signaled the end. She would follow it up with a something like, “I’m your mom and I don’t care,” or “You have to do anything I say,” or “I’m right. You’re wrong. Apologize now.” I knew the argument was over but I was feeling bold.
“You can’t just end the argument with that. It’s not fair. It’s not even relevant.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying. Relevant? What do you mean relevant?” Nothing angered my mother more than when I used an English word she didn’t understand. She fought with me in Chinese and I fought back in my broken Chinese-English mish-mash, going heavy on the English when I thought I had a chance to humiliate or trump her.
“It means instead of just responding to what I say, you end the argument by declaring you’re mom and that’s that.”
“Right. That’s that. Apologize now to your mother. Apologize to me and say that you were wrong.”
That was when I started crying, and later, she cried too because I wouldn’t apologize. All that just for a boy who smelled a little bit like the rubber tip on a #2 eraser.

____________
Cindy is coming home in two weeks and my mind is still fixated on death. My friend Diana says it’s a morbid curiosity, but it’s not that. It’s not as if I’m interested in people who are dying, or the physical aspects of death. It’s not like I’m fascinated by it and can’t look away when I see in the newspapers, or on TV, or anywhere else. I just can’t stop myself from being afraid of it. Sometimes, I sit up in the middle of class, and I just can’t get myself to listen to anything the teacher is saying. I just think about what it’s like to no longer have feelings, to be asleep forever, and I go home and slap myself all night long because I don’t want to fall asleep, I don’t want to do anything is would be similar to being dead, I don’t want to feel nothing for eight hours, or is it I don’t want to not feel, so I slap myself all night long, sneak off to the bathroom with a book underneath my nightgown and read it on the toilet so I can stay awake.
I quickly realize that the only thing that gets my mind off the subject of death is constant and nonstop masturbation. In health class, we have an entire discussion about why men masturbate more than women, and all the girls in the class, except Mickey Ravener, the token slutty girl, make a big fuss about how they never masturbate, and all the boys get uproarious and shout out the number of times they masturbate in a day.
“Three!”
“Four!”
“Five!”
“Six, or until it starts to chafe!”
“Until it becomes numb!”
“Until I’m jazzing blood!”
I feel embarrassed that I’ve started to masturbate just about every night now, and when I wake up, I do it again. It sounds ridiculous, but I’m afraid if I don’t, then I’ll start to think about my death again.
I tell Cindy on the phone about my death fixation, but I don’t tell her about the masturbation, and she responds by telling me I’m self-obsessed.
“Well obviously, everyone is afraid of dying.”
“Not everyone,” I tell her on the phone. “This kid in my class Marty claims he’s not afraid of what happens after death—”
“What, is he a devout Christian or something?”
“No, he’s an atheist actually. And the reason is because he says if you weren’t afraid of not being born, and if death is the like the mirror image of not being born, which is not being alive, then you can’t be afraid of that either.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Well the point’s that not everyone is afraid of death.”
“Well, everyone is afraid of death. Deep down. Of course they would be. But, it’ just so typical of you that you, at age 15 would be afraid to die, when you actually know people like Grandma and Grandpa who probably three breaths away from actually dying, and instead of worrying about missing them when they are gone, you worry about yourself. And what about mom and dad? Their lives are half over.”
Cindy depresses the hell out of me sometimes, and I want to tell her that she’s older than me, she has at least some sort of responsibility to me, blah blah blah don’t know how to end this sentence.