Memoirs of an Insane Freshman Girl

Chapter 10: The Winter Holidays

Chapter 10:  The Winter Holidays

         With my obsession growing each day as I longed from afar for Chris, the winter holidays were creeping up on me.  Now that the terrible month of November had concluded, December and Christmas were just around the corner.  November wasn’t completely horrendous because of the Thanksgiving celebration I had with my family.  As previously noted, most of my holiday experiences over my fifteen years have happened at my mother’s parents’ house.  For some unknown reason, whenever I refer to going over to my grandparents’ house, I always say Ma’s—I call that grandma Ma, and that grandpa Pa—and not Ma and Pa’s house because that’s just what I’ve always said.  I go over to their house twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, and always have from ever since I could remember—it’s never been any different. 
         
Of course, I’m not very much of a people person; so, I’m not much of a social bug when it comes to family events.  It’s not like I don’t like talking to people because I do.  In fact, once you get to know me, you’ll find that you’ll never get me to shut up—no matter how much you beg, I’m still there chattering away.  Hence the once you get to know me because I’m a completely different person when you first meet me then once you have gotten to know me.  When you just meet me, I may appear as shy or not willing to talk to other people.  Only the latter is true because I am really in no way shy.  I’m just quiet because I don’t really like talking to people I don’t know.  I’m not much of a conversation starter; I’m not much a people person at all.  Once you start to get to know me and find out more about me, I start talking more and then eventually never shut up.  Soon, you’ll wish that you had never started to get to know me at all once you find out the true me, the chattering queen herself, underneath all my layers of self-protection.
         
Thanksgiving and Christmas that year passed without much event.  Of course, they were both definitely overcelebrated events in my family, but they neither struck me as something out of the ordinary.  Of course, it’s probably because I have been attending these events that go as similarly as they did the last year at least a dozen times a year, for every holiday, birthday, or other occasion deemed to be important enough for my family to fret about, cook for, and gather in the same household for a day of some sort of celebration.  As noted on more than one account, I, not being the social chatterbug herself around my family, usually isolated myself to the depths of my grandmother’s basement, usually with the company of my two-years elder sister and nine-years younger cousin.  When my cousin was first born, she required much more attention and entertainment, but lately, she’s been getting older—obviously, she’s not getting any younger like all middle-aged people are hoping for these days—and capable of entertaining herself without much of Megan’s—my sister—or my undivided attention. 
         
Therefore, as the years have been passing, I have been allowed much more free time at said holiday celebrations and have spent such precious time lost in the stories of the fictional and unreal in some hopes of escaping the reality happening all around me.  It’s not that my reality is so horrible that I just don’t want to face it.  In fact, I am so much luckier than so many people.  I have everything that some people just dream about on seemingly endless nights.  No, I have it pretty darn good.  Of course, I’m one of those awful people who are never satisfied with what they have.  I’m always seemingly wanting more—more specifically, wanting what I can’t have.  In fact, even more specifically, wanting who I can’t have—of course, I’m backtracking a little to that awful month of patheticness and despair that I have forever tried to erase from my memory when I wanted who I couldn’t have.  Of course I wanted Chris when he had his girlfriend—even if it makes no sense, maybe even more than when he was single because I knew I couldn’t have him.
         
There’s something strange about feeling miserable that I can’t put my finger on.  Somehow, I always want to make myself feel miserable.  I can’t let myself feel happy.  Of course, I’m not always miserable.  In fact, I am rarely downright miserable, but I seem to always put on a damper on my happiness with thoughts of unpleasantness that I have fought forever to forget.  Even when Chris and I were together, I never really let myself be happy one hundred percent.  I don’t know what I was waiting for or hoping for because it would have seemed to the outside third party observer that I had gotten everything I had wanted.  Finally, after all those months of waiting and hoping, Chris was mine.  Officially.  Even though, honestly I’m not really one of those girls who cares about it being official.  Most girls have this whole game plan in their head of who they want to go out with and how they are going to achieve their goal. 
         
In the end, it’s always the same story.  The best friend of the girl goes and talks to said girl’s crush and tells him that he should ask out said girl because said girl likes him.  Then said guy asks out said girl, and they “go out”.  Then within a few weeks—a month, tops—they break up because they realize they really don’t have anything in common, or more likely because they realize they really don’t like each other.  Of course, it will always be the guy who breaks up with the girl because whether the girl is unhappy or not, in her state of desperation, she would rather claim she has a boyfriend that she doesn’t really like than admit defeat and failure.  Even though the girl really doesn’t like the guy anymore, the girl will be heartbroken once the guy tells her it’s over.  The guy will say that he never wanted to hurt her, and that he hopes they can still be friends.  If the girl really looks deep down, she will realize that she’s not heartbroken because she’s not in love with him—she never was.  If the girl doesn’t realize this, then she is sadly lying to herself and deceiving herself into thinking she was in love with this boy who she went out with for less than a month.  She’ll cry and claim the guy was an asshole; so, all friends of said girl will shun said boy because he hurt their girlfriend.  Friends are never allowed to date, much less talk to or acknowledge in a positive way, an ex-boyfriend.  It’s an unspoken rule among girls around the world. 
         
Of course, the let’s-just-be-friends thing never works.  Everyone knows that.  Except if it doesn’t end badly.  Of course, you must be asking how a relationship can not end badly.  Why would two people who obviously like each other so much who have been going out for five months end their relationship mutually without anger or demise?  How could two people who were previously in a relationship still talk to each other daily as perfectly good close friends without awkwardness or enmity?  Of course, you’re thinking that it’s impossible, but I must disappoint you and tell you otherwise.  Of course, not every relationship ends with anger or hate.  Some relationships end uneventfully, seeming not to hurt either party.  Whether either party is hurt or not, it’s inevitable that the two people will not talk to each other.  It’s another unspoken rule that you don’t talk to your ex-boyfriends.  Mostly, it’s because of the awkwardness factor.  Most people find it impossible to go back to that time before you started flirting and your best friends intervened to that great stage of good friends—if you even had the great stage of good friends. 
         
That’s the problem with teenage high school relationships these days.  There is no great stage of good friends.  To me, that’s the most important thing in any relationship.  If I can’t be friends with him before we go out, during the relationship, and after we break up, then it’s not worth it.  A boyfriend shouldn’t just be the guy you want to kiss.  A boyfriend should be your best friend.  He should be the guy you turn to when your whole life is falling apart.  He should be the guy who makes you happy and smile when tears are running down your face.  A boyfriend shouldn’t just be some guy you knew you could get to agree to go out with you to make someone else jealous or just to prove that you can get a boyfriend.  That’s not a real relationship.  A boyfriend is the guy you think about when you first wake up and when you fall asleep at night.  He’s the one who texts you good morning and good night every day even though you’re going to see him in an hour or the next day.  He’s the one who can’t stop looking at you or resist holding your hand in the middle of class under his desk while the teacher goes on about trigonometric functions in the background that you can’t hear because your heart is beating so loud as your small hands fit perfectly into his large boyish ones. 
         
Back to the holidays, there is one thing I must mention about Christmas.  In our family, Christmas Eve is definitely a much bigger deal than Christmas Day itself.  We all go over to my grandparents’ house on my mom’s side midday and then go over to my other grandparents’ house after that for the evening.  Now it’s just my grandma on my dad’s side because my grandpa died a couple of years ago from some sort of blood clot.  I’m not really exactly sure how he died, but I never really asked.  I don’t know why I never did, but I guess I’m just not one of those emotional people.  I wasn’t that particularly close to my grandpa, but he wasn’t one of those distant relatives you saw once a year, maybe, if you were lucky.  No, we were definitely kept in contact, but we just never really harbored much of a connection.  It was probably the sheer amount of grandchildren that he had that caused our not-so-close relationship.  Also, I was fairly young when he died.  I’m not sure exactly when—as we have determined, I’m not the best at remembering these things—but I was in that age where I didn’t even really talk to very many of my relatives.  Of course, that still stands mostly true today because I’m just not much of small talker.  Oh, how is school?  Fine.  How are you doing?  Fine.  How is being in high school?  Fine.  If I have to mutter any more fine’s and good’s, I think my head and brain will simply combust, along with the rest of my disobedient body.
         
As previously stated, I’m not really an emotional person.  In fact, on more than one occasion, my friends have determined that I really only have three emotions:  anger, jealousy, and unwavering happiness.  If I were to honestly admit the truth, I would have to agree with them that they are probably right.  I don’t like people seeing too much of me—too much of the real me.  It’s not like I try to hide behind some façade of who I am, but sometimes I can’t help it.  Sometimes I just want to shout that No, everything’s not okay!  I always appear the perfect balance of happy and cool.  Sometimes people even question my level of happiness that seems to astound them.  If only they really knew the truth.  It’s not that I’m some weird depressed girl who tries to pretend to be happy all the time.  The thing is that I am happy most of the time—when I’m laughing with my friends or just enjoying a good book—but sometimes I’m just not.  Everyone sees me as this girl who just has way too much energy and smiles too much, but no one ever sees the girl biting back her anger from exploding across the room.  No, in the real world, that girl doesn’t exist because that would mean she’s not perfect. 
         
I’m actually angry more of the time than I’d like to admit.  The thing is that no one would ever know that because I never admit it.  Only my real friends can tell when I am because I usually hide it.  Going off the subject of being angry and not admitting it, I must say that my ex-boyfriend is really a jerk.  Of course, I’m sure it must seem a little confusing right now in the story because it’s still wintertime, and my ex-boyfriend is as of now, only my “potential” boyfriend because as of this point in time, we were not officially going out.  Of course, you do about that awful incident of the “girlfriend”.  You must be thinking what an idiot I was for even considering going out with that boy after what he did to me.  I must agree with you in my idiocy, but sometimes liking a boy too much in times of desperation blurs your lines of perception and morals until you can’t really figure out where they started out.  After everything we had been through. . . I suppose I shouldn’t ruin the surprise because you don’t even know how we started going out, much less why we broke up.  I will continue the story where I left off and just leave you in your fit of wondering where the heck that just came from.  *Of course, it must be noted that this story may not be entirely unbiased or even told from the same emotional point of view over the course of this because it has been written over an extensive time period from mid second semester of freshmen year into sophomore year at this moment as I write these words.*
         
My girls—Chelsea, Heather, Ashley—and I had a New Year’s Eve party at Heather’s house this year—freshmen year, don’t be confused.  We had one last year at Ashley’s house, and we got all dressed up in fancy dresses and had a blast.  This year’s was even more of a treat because I hadn’t seen my girls in a while.  In fact, all of us going to different schools proved to be even more of an inconvenience and annoying obstacle for us to see each other than any of us had anticipated.  With school going on and practice from cross country that turned into soccer in the spring, I barely had time for much else, much less, as much I hate to admit it, my elementary school friends.  It’s not that we’re not friends anymore, but we’ve kind of fallen out of touch.  We used to all be pretty close—Chelsea and I were especially close—and again, I hate to admit it, but we’ve both pretty much moved on.  It’s not like we wanted it to happen or don’t want to be friends anymore, but we just don’t really have the time.  We’ve been slowly drifting apart all through freshmen year, and now we don’t see each other at all.  Well, at least I don’t see any of them.  I’m pretty sure Chelsea and Heather still talk and see each other, but somehow I’ve just managed to fall off the side of the earth to them.
         
Moving away from lost friendships, we had a great time that night just hanging out and drinking our fake wine.  Of course, I do remember a certain text message that I sent to a certain ex-boyfriend that night.  Of course, at this point in time, he was neither an ex-boyfriend nor a boyfriend at all, but that hardly matters.  You must be thinking a “Happy New Year” seems normal if not inevitable when it was indeed the New Year, but there was more meaning lying underneath the surface.  You see, Chris and I had been constant texting buddies for the past few months; so must so that I had to delete my messages every hour because I kept running out of memory on my phone.  This text led to a small conversation which nevertheless put a damper on the rest of my night—or morning, rather.  My friend Heather and I stayed up until six or seven in the morning, just talking about our boy troubles.  She had gotten out of a relationship with a boy, and she still liked him but didn’t know what to do about it.  I had my own boy troubles with obsessing over this guy so much that I was bordering on insane. 
         
I know it’s going to make me sound like a horrible, harsh friend and antisocial, but I must admit the truth.  Sometimes I just don’t like hanging out with people.  After a long day at school and hours of cross country practice, I just want to sit at home in my bed, read a book, and relax.  I don’t really feel like talking to people or doing anything.  That’s another thing you must learn about me—my antisocial skills that still don’t manage to get guys to stop bothering me.  I suppose now that you already know about the ended relationship with Chris, you should probably know what actually happened during the relationship that led to my thinking of him as a jerk.