We Were Invincible

I met you my senior year of high school. You had turquoise hair and talked to me as if we’d been friends a lifetime. That first day, the day I met you, you told me we were going to the mall after school. The final bell rang and I got in your car, a Volkswagen Jetta older than we were, passed down to you from your sister, who had gotten bored of the plain white paint and spray-painted a Duck Hunt mural on the sides the way bumptious boys adorn their cars with flames. We drove with the windows down and the radio blasting, and even in your ancient Jetta we overtook every car we met.

I had never before walked into a building feeling like I owned the place, but that’s exactly what we did. We walked into the mall with our arms linked and our heads held up high, ready to take the place by storm. Seventeen years old with the world at our fingertips. We dressed up in lavish outfits, posing for each other and fitting room mirrors. We stuffed our toes into the highest heels we could find, strutting back and forth with our hands on our hips and drowning in raucous laughter. We even went into a photo booth, our arms draped around each other, making faces at the camera. When the mall closed, you drove me back to my house and parked in my driveway. The stars were out, and we lay on the hood of your car, talking until the wee hours of the morning.

That is what I think of when I remember you: high heels and photo strips and lying on your Duck Hunt car as we looked up at the stars. And, of course, that feeling – like nothing in the world could possibly touch us. Like we were invincible.

We became inseparable, you and I. At school, we were above the mass populace. We were smarter, we were more charming, we had our shit figured out. We were special. While the rest of the class continued to struggle with the assignment, we whispered and giggled in the back of the classroom, because we’d already finished. While the rest of the school had to each lunch in the cafeteria, we had special permission to eat in our advisor’s office, just us two. While everyone else got caught up in petty high school drama, we were off in our own little world, above it all.

After school, we’d spend hours at the mall. We’d have countless fitting room fashion shows, each trying to outdo the other. We’d search for the goofiest accessories we could find in the Dollar Store and model them for two-minute photo shoots. We’d race each other from one end of the mall to the other, weaving in and out of shoppers and ducking into alcoves to avoid mall security telling us off for running.

I don’t think I spent a single weekend at home the whole of my senior year. Friday nights we’d hole up in your bedroom, queue up some romantic comedy or other on your laptop, and paint each other’s nails. We even learned how to make fun patterns and designs. We’d stuff ourselves with ice cream piled high with syrup and whipped cream, stay up late, and sleep in later. 

Sometimes I’d have a change of clothes with me, but usually I’d just borrow something of yours when we finally did wake up on Saturdays. Then we’d head to Michaels and each find a craft project to work on, which we’d take back to your house and start in on with more romcoms playing in the background. That year I learned how to draw, how to paint, how to knit and crochet and cross-stitch and sew. We’d spend the whole day just crafting, half-watching movies we’d already seen or didn’t care about, and talking. Talking about anything and everything. About boys and school and all that drama we were so above. About our hopes and our dreams and our plans once we graduated.

Every other Saturday night, I’d help you dye your hair, which was ever-changing. We’d sit in your tiny bathroom in our underwear, covered in spilled color and trying hard not to choke on bleach fumes. Once I even let you dye my hair, but I picked a bad color and had to dye it back a couple days later. We got it right later, though, when I finally dared to try again.

The summer after we graduated was full of late-night adventures and sleepovers that regularly turned into two or three or even four nights in a row. Sometimes you’d text me at 10 or 11pm, asking if I wanted to spend the night. I will forever associate that summer with late-night drives down the deserted country roads between our houses, windows down, moonroof open, and music blasting.

The day you turned eighteen, I held your hand as you got your first tattoo: a purple butterfly on your wrist. Purple, our shared favorite color, the color of your walls and your bedsheets and half your wardrobe and, quite often, your hair. And a butterfly to symbolize your favorite quote: Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly. You had that quote painted on your purple walls, and butterflies littered your life. They hung on your walls, painted or drawn; they decorated several of your t-shirts, skirts, dresses, even your socks; they adorned your wall-calendar and the cover of your journal; they were on your pens and the stationary that you only used for the specialest of occasions (which meant, of course, that not a single sheet had yet been used); and then there was the silver butterfly ring that never left your finger, not even for a moment. And now you had a purple butterfly permanently on your wrist, forever your protector.

I drew you a butterfly card for that birthday – sketched in pencil and filled in with soft pastels, the blues and purples blended together with my fingertips – and you hung it in a place of prominence on your wall before we left for the tattoo parlor. Sometimes I wonder if it’s still on your wall, one college dorm room and three apartments later. Somehow I doubt the card survived when not even the tattoo managed that.

We stood in your driveway on a scorching hot day in the middle of August next to your Duck Hunt Jetta, packed to bursting with everything you’d need at college. You stepped so close to me our noses were barely two inches apart, took both of my hands in yours, and said, “What distance?” You were still laughing as you slid behind the wheel of your car, slammed the door, and pulled out of the drive. I waved until you turned the corner out of sight, and you stuck your arm out of the window and waved back the whole time. Once you were gone, I got into my own car, parked on the street and also packed to the brim, and set off myself. Yes it sucked that our colleges were states apart, but I knew we’d remain just as close despite the miles between us. Like you said, what distance?

College was nothing like high school. It was loud and fast and full, and I was so very small and lost without you. I tried to make friends, but it seemed like every time I opened my mouth to say hello, everyone in my general vicinity would simply vanish, like smoke on the wind. I texted you every time I felt like crying, which was all but constantly. I asked you how you were doing, but what I meant was, are you still here with me? Are you still there to be my lifeline now that I’m finally drowning? You texted back that things were great. You’d joined a theater club and everyone in it was just so nice. They were mostly upperclassmen who had been friends for years already, but within minutes you were one of them. You said that you had bonded with three of them in particular, two junior boys and a sophomore girl. The girl and one of the boys had been high school sweethearts; you were sure they were going to get married one day, and you’d just love it if you got to be Maid of Honor. A wish you were granted, years later.

I tried not to text you every time I needed reassurance. I tried to give you space to be happy at your new school with your new friends. I knew all of that was important, so I didn’t blame you for no longer having time for me. But I still clutched my phone so tightly I thought the casing would crack, just waiting for a text to come through. I was sure that once the chaos that was the first few months of college calmed down, once you’d had time to settle into a routine, then you’d have time for me again. I could wait. I might have been drowning, but I would become a champion at holding my breath.

I even found my own group of friends. It felt like months before I did, but it was only a week and a half. I say I found them, but really it was the other way ‘round. They adopted me, just as you had. And they were wonderful, truly. There were three of them, just as you’d found for yourself. Natalie and Amelia were roommates. It was Nat who approached me first. She said that sitting alone in the cafeteria was “unacceptable,” and I was to join her and Amelia immediately – if that was alright with me, of course. They invited me to their room that evening, and, on a whim, I asked if I could bring along my own roommate, Penelope, to whom I hadn’t said more than two words in the week and a half we’d been living together. I don’t know why she came with me when I asked her, but she did, and the four of us just… clicked.

That night, once Penny and I had gone back to our room, turned out the lights, and Penny’s breathing grew slow and even, I texted you about my newfound friends. I was so excited I thought I’d surely burst, and I knew you’d be excited for me, too. I told you everything, from how we met to what we’d done all evening, and how we had plans to hang out all weekend, too. My fingers were trembling with the exhilaration of it all as I typed, and my thumb missed the “send” button three times. I watched as the words moved from the message box to the big blue bubble, as the word beneath it changed from “sending” to “delivered” to “read.”

I told myself I wouldn’t text you until you texted me, but I always broke first. I’d have some amazing adventure with my friends, or I’d get riled up about an annoying classmate, or I’d just see something funny I thought might make you laugh, and I’d tell you about it. Sometimes you’d answer – something short, like “haha” or “sounds fun” or “ok” – but mostly you wouldn’t. 

I tried to forget about you. I tried to lose myself in my new friends, these people who actually wanted to spend time with me. We spent just about every waking moment together, the four of us, making all sorts of fantastic memories. But still what I remember most about that time with them was my hand on my phone, waiting for you to miss me. And sometimes, finally, I would start to let you go, but the moment my fingertips were about to let go was always the moment my phone would ring. You were like a drug I would finally detox from my system, right before someone slipped you back in my drink.

I don’t think I’d ever been as excited for a school vacation as I was for winter break at the end of that first semester. Nor as anxious. I shouldn’t have been, but I was desperate to see you again. I tried so hard not to be, but I was. I think I just wanted to regain that feeling that you gave me, that invincibility, that feeling that I was important. I don’t know why no one else has ever been able to give me that quite like you did. Maybe it’s just because you were the first. But whatever the reason, I was like a child waiting for Christmas morning. Or maybe more like a lost puppy trying to get home.

I texted you weeks before school let out asking when you’d be home and if you wanted to get together. I’d been home for nine days already when you texted me at 10:47pm: “Do you wanna sleep over?”

I left a note for my parents and jumped in the car. The car thermometer said it was twelve degrees outside, but I put the heat on full blast, rolled down all the windows, opened the moonroof, and cranked up the music as I sped my way down the dark, slush-covered roads. I was about halfway to your house when it started to snow, snowflakes falling through the moonroof and drifting in the windows, the few that weren’t blasted immediately back out by the heaters settling on my hair and my eyelashes, but melting before they could do much more.

My safe arrival, despite my less than cautious driving in already unsafe conditions, was just more proof that, with you, nothing could touch me. I let myself in when I got to your house, as I always had. I didn’t even need to use a flashlight as I crept my way through the unlit hallways, so well did I remember them from the innumerable times I’d done this before, and I avoided all of the squeaky stairs as I made my way up to your room; your parents never minded me coming over late, so long as I didn’t wake them. When I rounded the corner of the stairs, I saw light spilling out from around the edges of your door, just like always, and that familiar light filled me the way the spirit of God fills some. I slipped in your door and shut it softly behind me, and there everything was – the purple walls, the butterflies, my sleeping bag and pillow tucked in a corner of the room. And you. You were lying on your twin-size bed, engrossed in your phone.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” you said, without looking up.

“Your hair’s brown,” I said.

“Hang on, I’m talking to Elizabeth.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay, no problem.” I don’t think you heard me.

One minute. Two. Three. I took out my phone and started playing a game, just so I wouldn’t have to stand there like a stranger in your room.

“Heeeey, what’s up!” Twelve minutes, but you finally jumped up and hugged me.

“Your hair’s brown,” I said again.

“Yeah, I decided to go back to natural for a while.”

“It looks good,” I said. “Weird, but good. I don’t think I even knew what your natural hair color was,” I laughed.

“Oh no, this isn’t my natural color, just a natural color.”

“Oh.”

“I was so happy you asked me to hang out,” you said. “I was worried you’d forget about little old me.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Oh, you know, just with all the excitement of new people and places, who even has time to remember the little folk back home?” you laughed.

“I texted you a lot,” I said, “but I wasn’t sure if they went through a lot of the time.”

“I love how I don’t even have to reply but you still know I love getting your little updates.”

I swallowed, hard. “So, um,” I said, swallowing again. “Tell me about your friends at school.”

“Oh. My gosh. They are the best. Elizabeth and Benjamin just make the sweetest couple; they’re totally going to get married someday, but I told you that already, didn’t I? But even though they’ve been together longer, I still think me and Lucas are cuter–”

“Wait, you and Lucas are dating?”

“Um, yeah, where have you been?” you said, laughing again. “We’ve been dating for months. And, speaking of, guess who no longer has their V-card?” you asked, pointing at yourself with both hands. “I gave it to him after we’d been dating for a week. How. Great. Is sex?”

“So, did you just get home?”

“Oh no, I’ve been back for about a week and a half. It is so dull here; I can’t wait to go back to school. How did we survive here for so long?”

“It’s a mystery.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. All this boredom really takes it out of a girl, you know?”

“Right, yeah.”

“Sweet dreams, then,” you said as you turned off the lights.

I unrolled my sleeping bag in the dark, arranging it and the pillow in my usual spot. I crawled in and stared at the ceiling, not remotely tired. I was barely settled when the blackness of the ceiling vanished, replaced by the soft blue glow of the screen of your phone. Through the semi-darkness I could hear the tik-tik-tiking of you texting, a sound that was still ongoing when I finally fell asleep at quarter to four in the morning, and even then I heard it in my dreams.

I woke up before you – not a rare occurrence, but usually we were up within half an hour of each other. Then again, we usually fell asleep around the same time, too; lord only knows how long you continued to text your new and better friends after I fell asleep. I dressed in the dark – the morning light blocked out, as always, by your heavy curtains – and played around on my phone for about an hour, waiting for you to wake. When you didn’t, I grabbed a book off your shelf and made my way downstairs, where I helped myself to some frozen waffles. When I finished the waffles, I stayed seated at your kitchen table and read. It was an hour and a half before you came down, and maybe I imagined it but you almost looked surprised to see me.

Once you’d finished your breakfast, I followed you back to your room, unsure whether or not that is what I was supposed to do. 

“Close the door, would you?” you asked as I entered.

I stood by the closed door as you stripped out of your pajamas and rummaged around in your dresser.

“Do you want to go to Michaels today?” I finally asked as you were pulling a t-shirt over your head. It was deep blue and featured a stylized fox face.

“Listen, I’m so glad you came over,” you said, “because there’s something I wanted to give you.” You pawed through the jewelry box on your dresser for a moment or two, then turned around to face me, your hand outstretched, palm up.

Sitting in your palm was your butterfly ring. I hadn’t even noticed that you weren’t wearing it.

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” you said. “I want you to have something special to remember me by, even when we’re far apart.”

The warmth of your palm against the tips of my fingers was such a sharp contrast to the cold metal of the ring as my fingers wrapped around it, taking it from you. It was heavier than I thought it would be. I slipped it on, internally crowing that you had given this ring to me, not to Elizabeth, not to anyone else, but to me.

That was when I noticed your wrist.

“Hey, what happened to your tattoo?”

“Oh, laser removal. I’m really into foxes now. It’s this thing Lucas and I came up with, where I’m a fox and he’s a bear. It’s so cute. I’ve got, like, fox everything now. See?” you said, tugging at the hem of your fox-face t-shirt.

I glanced down at the butterfly ring adorning my finger – so meaningful just a few moments prior, now little more than a small hunk of metal.

I wore your butterfly ring every day for four months. I would fiddle with it every time I was tempted to keep my hand on my silent phone, waiting for a text that was never going to come. That ring was my methadone, keeping my hands busy to help me kick my addiction. It worked, and it didn’t. I stopped reaching for my phone so much, but the ring became an addiction in and of itself, worse even than its predecessor. That ring symbolized my entire relationship with you – the friend I remembered, who loved butterflies and hanging out with me; and the stranger you became, so willing to throw away everything you’d cherished as soon as you found something –someone – better. That ring was so bittersweet, and possessing it caused within me such intense and conflicting emotions that I could not give up. The highs I felt when I looked at that ring were beyond anything I’d ever known, and the lows were so devastating I thought I was surely going to die. But the thing is they all came at once, those highs and lows together, so that each felt like the other, and I came to associate pain with pleasure, pleasure with pain. I had hoped, initially, that the hurt associated with your ring would help me to let you go; if I wore a constant reminder of the pain you’d caused me, surely I wouldn’t still yearn for your affection. Instead, I grew only more attached to you, desperate for you to love me again, yet still gaining some sick satisfaction when you’d inevitably wound me further. Each scar you gave me became, in my mind, proof of your affection.

After four months of anguish, I took off the ring. I no longer understood a single emotion I had, and I had long ago gone mad with longing. I didn’t know how to fix myself, but I knew that this ring symbolized everything that was wrong inside my head. I was walking back to my dorm room after class when I did it. I was walking over a storm drain, and I stopped. Both feet on the grate. I started shifting my weight from my heels to the balls of my feet and back again just to savor the feeling of the something-then-nothing beneath my feet. I remember thinking maybe shifting my weight like this was like folding a piece of paper back and forth along the same crease, weakening it until it finally rips. Maybe if I shifted my weight back and forth and back and forth for long enough, the bars of the grate would weaken and then snap, and I’d fall right in and disappear forever.

I don’t know how long I stood there, just shifting my weight between my heels and the balls of my feet, the rest of my body swaying almost imperceptibly with each shift, waiting to fall into the eternal void that surely lay just beneath the storm drain. I do know that at some point I stopped. Stood perfectly still, so still I might not have even existed at all. Maybe the people walking all around me couldn’t even see me anymore; maybe I was invisible I was so still. I was so still that even my thoughts stopped. For just a moment or two, my mind was a perfect blank, and I took a breath as I stood there.

Then I raised your ring, still on my finger, to my eyes. I stared at it for nearly a minute, and then I took it off. I crouched down on the storm grate. I took the ring between my thumb and forefinger and held it over one of the gaps in the grate. Time seemed to stop as I held your ring over an abyss, threatening to lose it from this world forever. I think I might have cried then, but I honestly can’t say for sure. I wasn’t aware of any tears rolling down my cheeks, but when the wind blew, it felt wet against my face.

I couldn’t drop it.

Time began again and I stood up and ran back to my room as though the Devil himself were chasing me, your ring clutched tightly in my fist. I flew into my room and slammed the door behind me, still not daring to stop and breathe. I strode across the room to my dresser, and the jewelry box sitting atop it. I flung the box open and dug through the tangled heap of bracelets and necklaces I never wore that lay within. I dug until I reached the very bottom, and there I placed the ring. I piled the old bracelets and necklaces over it again, burying your ring quite thoroughly. That is where I kept it from then on, hidden at the bottom of my jewelry box. Never worn, nor even looked at, yet still not thrown away.

I no longer kept my hand on my phone while out with my friends, but I still texted you whenever no one else was looking.

With the approach of each school vacation, I always told myself that I wouldn’t ask you to hang out. And as soon as I was back in my childhood bedroom, I would always text you to ask if we could. Every yes was the same: me, desperate to remind you how we used to be; and you, dangling me along on a string, gracing me with your presence but never your attention.

After a couple years at school, we each moved out of the dorms and our parents’ houses, and into apartments near our respective schools. Once you moved out, your parents even sold your childhood home and retired to a town by the ocean. I thought surely this was it, the end of you and me. After all, we only ever saw each other when we both went home for breaks, and, with the sale of the house I knew almost better than my own, you would never again have cause to return to the sleepy little town in which we met. I was devastated, and oh so relieved.

But, for reasons I may never understand, you were not yet ready to cut that string on which you held me. Instead, you encouraged me to drive up to your apartment on breaks. I would blast my music for the three-hour drive and arrive exhausted. The three of us – you, me, and Lucas, with whom you now lived – would sit on your couch for hours as you played YouTube videos on your TV, and every time I opened my mouth you’d say, “Shh, you’re missing the video!” Then I’d crash on your couch and drive three hours back the next morning.

We soon graduated college and got Real Jobs™, but not much else changed. You still texted me just often enough to keep me hooked on you, and I would still drive three hours up to sit silently beside you and your boyfriend and then three hours back about once every two or three months, whenever you had time for me. For years, this is how it was, and I was never strong enough to change it.

Then, I met a man.

It was my first time trying a dating website, and he was the first person I talked to upon signing up. The only person I talked to, actually. I messaged him because I lived in New Hampshire and he lived in California and who could be safer to talk to as I eased my way into the online dating pool than a man who lived three thousand miles away?

Falling in love with him was faster and easier than anything I’d ever experienced. A month after we started talking, I flew to California to meet him in person. By the time I flew home four days later, I knew I would spend the rest of my life with him.

Nine months into our relationship, the lease on my apartment was up, my car was packed to the brim with all my worldly goods, and the love of my life was on a Boston-bound plane, preparing to be my co-pilot on a two-week road trip back to California and our first shared apartment. Here it was: the biggest adventure of my life thus far. All I had left to do was to say my goodbyes.

You said I had to see you before I left. Of course, I agreed. Luckily, your apartment wasn’t even out of the way; it was directly on the route we would already be driving. I told you when we’d be passing through your neck of the woods, date and time.

“I work Sundays,” you said. “Can’t you pick another day?”

“Don’t you get an hour lunch break, though?” I asked. “We can just get a quick bite to eat.”

“Saturdays are my day off,” you said. “Come up then!”

“But all our hotels are booked already. We can’t change them.”

“So just come see me on Saturday, go back and stay another night at your place, then start your trip on Sunday. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal,” I said, “is that we’re already going to be driving seven or eight hours a day, sometimes more, for two weeks straight. I can’t just add another six hours on top of that the day before, not when I’m already driving through that area anyway. Please,” I begged, “isn’t there any way we can make Sunday work?”

“I told you, I’m working.”

“Well then, you can come see me on Saturday. It’ll be fun; you never come to my place!”

“I would,” you said, “but I’m already driving down that way later that week. I’m getting a new tattoo! There’s a parlor that has great reviews just a couple towns over from where you are, actually. So I don’t want to do that many back-and-forth trips so soon after each other, you know? That’s just more driving than I think you realize.”

Saturday, the day before our trip was set to begin, you texted me: “So…?”

That was all you said. So much presumption in such a little word. The expectation that I’d move heaven and earth just to see you one last time before I moved.

I cried as I told you I would not. I told you I was sorry, that I wished I could see you before I left, but it just didn’t work out. You weren’t free when I was driving through, and you wouldn’t come see me, so it didn’t work out.

“I didn’t even know coming to see you was an option!” you said.

That conversation was so recent you barely would have had to scroll up to see it.

“I guess,” you said, “I’m just upset because I feel like I’m never going to see you again.”

It took me two days to respond to that message – two days for my fingers to stop shaking with anger, and with hurt, to be able to type. “I’m sorry you’re upset,” I said, “but let’s be real: I have never been a priority to you, and I am not going to put myself out now just to pretend to myself that I am.” I hit send, and my partner held me as I cried. I buried my face in his chest as I let out gut-wrenching sobs, and I felt his own tears fall into my hair as he bore witness to my grief.

When I finally sat up, wiping my puffy eyes on the backs of my hands, he asked me, “What do you want her to say back? How do you want this to go?”

“I don’t care,” I spat. “I don’t care what she says. I’m done with her, done with all of this. She’s never done anything to show me that I mattered to her, so I don’t care. I don’t care if she says she’s sorry or not; I’m just done.”

He squeezed my hand, not saying anything.

“No,” I said, “that’s not true.”

“Then, what do you want her to say?” he asked.

“Something,” I said.

My partner and I had an amazing road trip. We saw the New York City skyline from the George Washington bridge, and we explored Colonial Williamsburg. I met one of his childhood friends now living in Virginia, and he met one of my childhood friends now living in Pennsylvania. We explored the stunning botanical gardens in Atlanta, and a homeless man helped us change the flat tire we got as we tried to leave. We got caught in a sudden downpour as we walked the streets of New Orleans, as drenched the moment the rain started as we could possibly be. We drove through more ghost-towns than I could count, and we saw sun rise over the Grand Canyon. We stayed in 2-star hotels with comfy beds, free wifi, and free continental breakfasts, and we stayed in 5-star hotels with rock slabs for beds, $20/night wifi, and $15 plus 30% fees on room service. We played word-games to keep each other awake as we drove, napped in McDonald’s parking lots when that wasn’t enough. We drove through rain so thick we couldn’t see the taillights ahed of us, wind so strong it jostled the car, and skies bluer than I ever thought possible. And after two long yet incredible weeks, we finally pulled into the driveway that was ours-not-his, and parked.

“I guess that’s it then,” I said.

“Yup, home at last,” he said, knowing I wasn’t talking about the trip.

“Home at last,” I repeated.

“Still nothing?” he asked, glancing at my phone in my hands.

“Not a single word.”

“I’m sorry, love.”

“I didn’t want much,” I said. “I didn’t need her to apologize or say I was right. She could’ve yelled at me, called me names, told me she hated me, even. Because even if she got angry at me, you don’t get angry at people you don’t care about.”

He reached over and held my hand.

“She did the one thing she could’ve done to confirm what I said – that I don’t matter to her.”

“I know she meant a lot to you.”

I didn’t block your number from my phone, nor did I block you on social media (although I did remove you from my friends list). I don’t know why I didn’t block you. I think part of it is because I hoped you’d actually try to contact me someday. And I think part of it was because I knew you never would. And because sometimes, the only reasons I can remember for not messaging you are the two-hundred and sixty-one days and counting that you haven’t been blocked and have not said a single word to me. The truth is I miss you, and I’m not sure if that feeling will ever end. Because even though you were cruel to me for far longer than you were kind, still when I think of you it is of high heels and photo strips and lying on your Duck Hunt car as we looked up at the stars, back when we were invincible.