I hate you.
I love you.
Leave...don't go away.
I can't decide if I like your face
Or if I wish it would stray.
You're a child, but you're malicious,
You're sweet, but don't remember my name,
Heads I win,
Tails I'm lost,
Love equals pain.
~ Jewel, Gray Matter
He was one of those kids who would either grow up and change the world, or live his entire life as a petty thug. Some people are just made that way. There's no middle ground for them.
I alternately adored and loathed him, from the day I met him up until this moment.
It's funny: even with the memory damage that I've suffered, there are certain people who always stand out in my mind; certain people where I remember just about every conversation or meeting that we've ever had. I remember the day I met him. Not everything about the day, but certain things. It was a Monday. School was holding an assembly, not in the hall where we usually had them, but in the gym. We had to take our shoes off, and I remember freaking out because I'd forgotten to remove the pink polish from my toenails, and I was convinced that a teacher was going to yell at me. We had a sometimes-strict rule about nail polish and makeup at that school - I say sometimes-strict, because you could always tell which girls would get away with breaking it. I wasn't one of them.
Anyway, I remember the morning clearly. Pink toenail polish, bare feet, and me freaking out. I didn't sit with the girls and boys I usually sat with, because that year my "friends" were the ones who the teachers watched, hawk-eyed. I sat with a different couple of girls and boys from my class, and a couple who weren't - I never had a set crowd in high school, I just kind of floated from group to group, always welcomed but never committed - and found myself sitting in front of The New Boy. One of the kids in our group asked me if I'd met him yet. I hadn't, and I knew how hard it could be to be the new kid, especially in a school as cliquey as ours, so I turned around and smiled. And my head nearly imploded. I was heavily into astronomy at that point, and I clearly remember thinking that looking at him felt like how I imagined it would feel to stare into a black hole. I'd never met a teenager so forceful and magnetic. Looking at him was like looking into endless darkness, yet with a feeling that there was so much that was hidden.
I need a name for him here. I can't continue to call him New Boy, so we'll continue with the astronomical theme and call him Pluto. It fits. Pluto was the Roman equivalent of Hades - "the unseen". I often felt like he was unseen by most of the teachers and students. I wonder if he felt that way too.
Me? Oh, I saw. I saw someone extraordinary. I wanted to know everything about him, to be his friend and walk and talk with him.
Except, for some reason, he seemed to take a dislike to me.
To this day, I don't know why. With other people he was friendly enough. Sometimes quiet, sometimes sullen, in the way that every teen on the planet can be, but reasonably friendly. He made friends with a group of boys, including my friend's boyfriend and the guy I sat next to in math, boys who I wasn't close to but none of whom seemed to hate me the way he did. Well, dislike. Hate is probably too strong a word.
I didn't confront him to ask him why he didn't like me. Nowadays, I might have done so. Back then, I wasn't as plain-spoken as I am now. Also, I was a coward. I didn't want to hear that I'd done something to offend him, or that he found my personality repellent, or that my face and body made him want to throw up. I wanted him to like me, as I - sometimes - liked him.
Again, like is the wrong word. I adored him, was drawn to him, but often didn't like him. Particularly on the day he slammed my hand in the math classroom door. Or the day he shoved past me going down the stairs and knocked me down half a flight. Or the day we were put in the same trampolining group, and he crawled under my trampoline when I was getting ready to execute a difficult flip that I'd never tried before, causing me to jar my back and putting me off the sport right up to this day.
Yeah, I hated him at times. None of that hate made me any less intrigued.
I missed a lot of school through illness - maybe half of my classes. In bad months, maybe two thirds. But when I was there, I watched him. I watched him when he laughed with friends, and when he sat alone, caught in depression. I smiled when he seemed happy, and my heart broke for him when he was sad. I burned with righteous anger when he was accused of damaging a teacher's car, something that I don't think was ever proven whether he did or not - although of course that never stopped the rumours spreading.
I took art in Year 10 and 11, and my fingers itched to draw him. The boy defined chiaroscuro. Dark brown hair, darkened to black by the use of hair gel. Moonshine skin, eyes like obsidian chips. He bore more than a passing resemblance to a young David Boreanaz, which may have been part of the attraction for me, but there was a wintriness to him that even the vampire Angel didn't possess. Sometimes I attempted to draw him, but the pictures never came out right. I always felt like my pictures were of a glossy illusion, a reflection in those obsidian chips, rather than the real boy. Yet I'm not sure that, had I got to know him better, my drawings would have been any more successful. I feel like the real him was too big to be confined on paper.
We talked occasionally. Sometimes, on seemingly random occasions, he'd walk up to me and insult me. On rarer occasions, he'd start an actual conversation, talk for a few minutes, and then insult me. Usually it was mild insults, like telling me I had a stupid name. For most of my school days, I went by Sandy, so he took to calling me Pebbles. Nowadays, of course, I'd laugh at that and take it as a compliment that a guy wanted to give me a nickname. Back then, all I could think of was that he thought I had a stupid name. :)
Some of the insults were a little harsher. Once, I was sitting after trampolining with a friendly acquaintance - not quite a friend - who had seen the gems that I carried in my purse and bag and pockets. I was into crystal healing a lot that year, and carried a heap of carnelians (for blood purification and energy) and lapis lazuli (to stimulate creativity), as well as a few others - jade for mental clarity, citrine for physical energy. I swear, my handbag and pockets looked like I'd walked out of ancient Egypt. *grins* She and I were looking at the gems, and I was telling her what they were supposed to do. And Pluto walked over - we were waiting for the minibus to take us back to school, and there weren't many people around - and asked to see the stones. He ran his fingers through the pile of crystals on my hand, and asked for an explanation.
And then told me I should be in a mental asylum.
I can laugh about it now, but I wouldn't talk to him for about a month after that. Particularly when the rumour started flowing that I HAD been in a psych hospital. I have no real reason to think he started the rumour, but at the time I assumed it was him. Perhaps unfairly.
Looking back, I wonder if he really hated me as much as it appeared. In some ways, I'd had a sheltered life as a kid. People had generally liked me. A few had been outright cruel, but they had always been very vocal about why they didn't like me. I'd never come across the phenomenon of boys being mean to girls they like - or, indeed, the other way round - and it never occurred to me that he might feel anything but this unexplained apparent abhorrence for me.
Three things over the years have given me pause to think that perhaps his feelings for me were as complicated as mine for him. Firstly, the guy I sat next to in math told me, on the very last day of school, that Pluto didn't hate me. At least I think he did. I casually brought it up - they were good friends, and it was easy to steer the subject in that direction - and when I laughed and said that Pluto had always seemed to dislike me, math guy stared and me for what seemed like half an hour, shook his head, and said, "Jesus, you're smart, but when you get things wrong you really get them wrong." I never asked for clarification, and math guy died a few years later, so I'll never get it.
Secondly, one time when I was walking to my Dad's house with a couple other friendly acquaintances - again, not close friends - a boy appeared out of nowhere and started walking with me. He was sweet and charming and cute, and he talked to me for a good twenty minutes, and offered to carry my bag. I didn't recognise him, and assumed he was from the year above - it was a big school (by English standards), with perhaps 500-600 kids spread over seven classes, and while I knew all the kids in my class I didn't know all that many from the other classes. Much later, one of the girls I'd been walking with that day mentioned how Pluto had carried my bag for me and talked to me. I was shocked to find that the charming boy of that day, who I'd been vainly searching for in school, was actually my tormentor.
This may sound odd to you, but I suffer from a condition called prosopagnosia - face blindness. People with this condition (although it comes in varying levels of seriousness - mine is moderate) find it difficult to recognise faces as a whole, without thinking about it. I recognise my mother, and one or two people that I've known for many years, but most people - even close friends - require some thinking about. I can put features together to make a composite, but it takes me a little while. My brain can see a friend and say, "High cheekbones, broad face, pointed chin, green eyes, freckles, blonde hair - it must be Sasha." But I have to do it consciously, whereas most people recognise familiar faces unconsciously. Also, context matters a great deal. If I see Sasha in a place that I was meant to meet her, I'll recognise her with few problems. If I accidentally run into her in our town, it'll take me a few moments to kick my brain into gear. If I run into her in an unexpected place, say in Manchester or abroad, my brain will struggle to recognise her at all. And if she dyes her hair black or wears heavy makeup or a push-up bra? Forget it. And that's Sasha, who I've known for twelve years.
I'd known Pluto for a year or two at that point. I'd never seen him with anything other than his regular hairstyle - his hair spiked with gel that made it look black. But on this afternoon it was brown and soft and shiny and flopped in his eyes - I guess he'd had a shower after gym and forgotten to style it. We were all wearing uniform. I'd never known him to walk home that way before. I had no chance of recognising him.
I wish I had. I wish that I'd known that the sweet boy I was talking to was him, because maybe that could have opened a door to friendship.
Thirdly, a month or two after the crystal incident, I got a present in the mail. It was an utterly beautiful pair of silver earrings, with a piece of lapis in the centre. They came in a white box, and written on the box was a note, signed with his first name. It is a common name - I know at least four other boys who have it, boys that are closer to me than he was, and I have no real reason to think the earrings were from him, particularly since he would have had to get my address from someone at school. But it did always make me wonder.
[Edit: I searched for, and finally found, the earrings, although not the box.]
One of the last days I saw him at school, we were sitting in reception at lunchtime, waiting on teachers. He looked sad and tired, and I wanted to lean over to him, and tell him how extraordinary he was.
Why didn't I do that?
I'm not writing this well. I want to tell you all the wonderful things about him, all the reasons why he shone, but I don't know how to express those things. So many of them were intangible. He was a wonderful artist, and had a keen intellect - on the few times he spoke up in class. But so much of his beauty was hidden. You're probably reading this note and wondering why I loved him. I can't tell you why. All I can tell you is that there was so much beauty under the surface.
We left school. I saw him once at a nightclub, and once at a party, and once across a platform at a crowded station. Even there, my eyes were drawn to him. Then I never saw him again.
I occasionally searched, as I did for many of the people I went to school with. I did Google searches in the year or two after school finished, with the vague idea in the back of my mind that I could say hi and maybe bury whatever invisible hatchet there was. I never found him. The few friends I kept in touch with shook their heads and said they didn't know. Usually they followed this with, "Why would you want to get in touch with him? You hated each other in school!"
That was why, although I could never verbalise my feelings to my friends. I still can't put them out here, quite. I never had a satisfactory resolution to the question of why he disliked me. I don't like unfinished business.
So I looked for him. I never found him. I wondered if he had died, and I mourned. By the time Facebook rolled around, it didn't occur to me to search. Until recently.
Recently, I found out that he didn't die. The reason I never found him is that he got famous and changed his name.
You'd think that my feelings upon hearing this would be envy, or wistfulness, and there's a dollop of those in there. But the overwhelming emotions, the things that fill my heart and make it want to shatter, are pride and joy. I'm so proud of him. It's not my place to be, but I am anyway. And the joy I feel is tremendous. The thought that a boy who seemed so unhappy most of the time, who spent so much time in the shadows, unseen, is now established in a career that he loves where he's respected by thousands - that lifts my soul more than I can say.
Music is his speciality, which surprised me, because I had never known him to be a musician. He was an excellent artist, and had a wellspring of creativity, but I'd never known his musical side.
I YouTubed him, and listened, with tears streaming down my face. His music is piercingly beautiful.
There's a place in Menorca, called the Cova d'en Xoroi, that's entirely made of a network of caves in the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean. Many years ago it was made into a nightclub, but it remains mostly natural - the only things that have been added are necessities like bars and toilets, and a couple of outdoor terraces with chairs and loungers. When the moon is in the right phase, it rises over the ocean. You can sit in a chair on the terrace, with the ocean breeze blowing, ambient trance music - the favourite of most of the club's DJs - playing at just the right volume inside, and the moon in front of you, making a silver path on the waves that looks for all the world like you can walk on it.
That's how Pluto's music feels to me. It feels like the moon and the ocean and the cool breeze in my hair. It breaks my heart and lifts it up simultaneously. Much as he did, all those years ago.
Chances are I will never write to him. If I do, I'll just be another douchebag from school who wants something now that he's famous. I won't do that. My years of wanting something from him are over.
But I'll keep him on my iPod. I'll listen. I'll probably cry from time to time, with sadness for a boy who carried the weight of the world on him, and happiness and pride for a man who has become more brilliant than even I could ever have imagined.
