Walled in Heart

    Jackie's golden brown eyes always seemed to make me lightheaded.  Every time I found myself gazing into their mystery, and it happened quite often, I found it hard to think clearly.  All of my walls and defenses rose up to try to protect me from the mere imagining that she could be mine.  That possibility was all I dreamed about and it made everything else fade into the background.  School, work, family, friends, all the areas of my teenage life that should mean something suddenly meant nothing when she glanced my way.
    But with this unhealthy obsession came plenty of heartache.  She was the girl that everyone wanted.  Every girl in our group of lesbians either had dated her or really really wanted to.  Another road block was she had a fiance.  Emilia.  The woman who's very name made my anger rise to try and suffocate me time and time again.  They had been together on and off for years and I felt that I couldn't even compete.  They had so much shared history and I was just the new girl in town, trying on the new title of lesbian at the ripe age of sixteen.
    Jack was my first girl crush, but the term 'crush' didn't seem to encompass my emotions properly.  I was constantly struggling in an inner war of jealousy, longing, and despair, aching for her undivided attention and spiraling down into a depression when I didn't have it.
    Every second of every day I thought of her.  I scribbled on the margins of my notes for class little thoughts like ' I can't live without her ' and ' Why am I letting myself go crazy!'  The hardest part was that she DID pay attention to measly ole' me and constantly filled my head with whispers of dreams about us being together.  It caused her a lot of guilt that she felt these feelings for me because she didn't want to hurt Emilia, and I tried to understand where she was coming from.
    But how can you be in love with two people at the same time?  I never could grasp the concept.  It ripped my insides to shreds to think about the two of them together.  Images of Jackie holding her and loving her made me see red and green.  Such rage as I never felt before or since boiled in my blood when Emilia would beep Jackie's walkie on her black chunky nextel.  On speaker phone I would hear her loud voice say 'I love you' and I would have to stay silent when Jackie responded back so Emilia didn't know I was there.  Ooooh yes, she suspected something was up.
    When I started to come to Jackie's house literally every day after school, Jackie stopped telling her I was hanging with everyone else at her house to try and stop Emilia's accusations.  I seemed to be with her all the time at Jack's little house on flower street.  We never hung out anywhere else.  It was our hub and we had many an underage drunken night on the grass out front underneath the stars.  For some reason Emilia never came around those nights with the drinking and random friends coming and going, so I had Jackie virtually to myself.  That didn't stop her constant calls and kissy sounds on the phone.  The walls in my heart started to build up even higher.
    Jackie always said that getting me to open up and say what was on my mind was like pulling teeth.  I so wanted to blurt out all my intense feelings and confused thoughts so that she could help me sort through them, but it was so hard for me to just start talking.  I always felt like I needed to be somewhat mysterious to her, so that she would be fascinated when I DID end up speaking.  But once she saw how incredibly boring I was inside, I feared she would stop her flirtations and forget me completely.  I had little to offer a confident, beautiful, amazing girl who had such 'mojo' as everyone called it, that no one, gay or straight, could resist her charisma.  I was weird, brooding and downright depressing, especially around a group.  Our friends were the touchy-feely kind and they were always hugging each other and sitting in each others laps.  I was in the furthest chair in the furthest corner of the cramped living room by myself, smoking a cig, trying not to attract their attention and find a random butt in my lap or get entangled in an uncomfortable embrace.  I envied their carefree behavior, not caring what others thought of them seemed freeing to my caged eyes.  Many a sit-down intervention occurred, with Jackie's ma as mediator, about my aloofness, all to little success.  I just wasn't brought up on hugs and kisses.  I didn't know how to handle that kind of openness, so I stayed in my gloom puffing on that same newport alone with my raging and broken thoughts.  Looking back at that time I must have seemed like such an asshole; heartless and unfeeling.  They didn't see how intense my thoughts raced through my mind.
    Jackie saw it.  Every day, she tried her hardest to plow my walls down, even if it was only one small victory at a time.  She fought tirelessly at her task, receiving little encouragement from me and even some anger that she tried.  Some days I wanted to be set free and others I enjoyed my comfy prison, never wanting to leave its familiar darkness.  Why should I escape its safety when Jackie didn't even plan to end it with Emilia and commit to just me?  That rejection with an open heart would be too great to handle, risking my spirit falling apart completely.
    Some nights we had hours long conversations lasting into the morning all ending with the same topic that started with the words 'What if.'
    "What if we were finally together?  What then?"
    "What if I left Emilia?  Would you open up to me?  Is it worth losing a sure thing with her to go on hope that we'll connect and be happy?"  We never answered those questions so we had more and more conversations fantasizing about what being together would be like.
    She truly did love me, and I had never loved someone so intensely as I loved her.  What was the problem?  My hesitation and fear finally frustrated her long enough.  I would never get out of my funk and be open enough with her to make her leave the other girl she loved.  I had lost the war and I finally faded from her world.
    Until three years later...

to be continued