We moved and moved and moved.  I would've built up stronger walls for myself but I was always leaving behind the structures that I'd started.  My Dad is a radio DJ so his travels became my travels, all around Virginia and North Carolina.   We even lived in a place called Java, once.  My Dad ran a general store.   It's where I discovered Funyuns.  We moved because there were snakes and raccoons in our house.  My only memory of there is wanting to run away.

I lived in my Grandfather's basement for a while.   I slept naked with a fan two inches from my face because of the humidity.  I woke up each morning to a pissed bed whether I had to use the bathroom or not.  It was like living in a pool of water that doesn't grant you the joys of swimming and floating.  It lets you sink.  Every morning brought a foggy little rectangle of glass and the feeling that I could never rise above this.

The depression of puberty began to set in.  I didn't dye my hair black and start listening to Pantera.  I didn't go from "hey I like to draw" to "leave me alone nobody understands my art" like so many kids do.  I liked drawing the Ninja Turtles one day and looking at girls while I drew Ninja Turtles the next day.  And this is where I discover my major flaw in life:   I don't forget.

I don't forget the moments of my life.  No moment goes by casually.  I do this because the moments that I DO forget are the ones I've prior deemed inconsequential.  It romanticizes things.  It makes me feel like I've been constructive with the time I've been given.  However much that ends up being.  I wrote a novel.  I've been published in magazines.  I got an e-mail from a guy who told me that what I wrote about having an eating disorder helped him tell his mother about it, and how much better it made their lives.  And I never write about the days I waste.  I never write about sitting.  I never write about how heavy I feel on the outside.  Like I'm moving in a different gravity.  About how some days my chest hurts and I can't breathe, and all I get from it is bad TV and too much masturbation.  It's not romantic.  It isn't consequential.  It's the caulk that fills in my cracks and edges.  And it's the one I'm forced to suck by consequence.

The "first" girl has become Karla Jean Davis.   Ringlet-haired Christian.  Aranea Cavatica.  The one I keep coming back to.  I write about her when I write about anything.  I use her to fill in the blanks, and honestly it wasn't her that came first.  It was the girl in Spanish Class.  Ness Falls.  With a name like a soft drink or a rest stop.

She's the face I see when I look in the toilet.   The first girl who made me feel like less of a person because I wasn't the person she wanted to talk to in the moment I chose.  I don't believe for one second that she made me feel bad on purpose because who does that?  She never walked up to me and broke me.  She did it in her spare time.  When the thought passed by.  I'm sure she did it to others.  And I'm sure she didn't care.  Because why would you care?  You have better things to worry about.

And that terrified me.

That there were better things to think about than me.

Ness Falls never lost sleep about the things she said about or to me because I wasn't of consequence to her.  I'm still not of consequence to her.  The last time I saw her was when I was tending bar at an Applebee's.   She sat at the corner end of the bar with a cigarette in one hand and a baby balanced around the other.  She looked at me, and I like to think she knew who I was without the extra 90 pounds and above the 5 foot 9 I used to be, but she didn't.  She forced me for the first time to realize that the moments of my life don't matter.   She was walking nihilism.  A brick wall.  A severed ear.

The moments of my life don't matter. 

They don't matter.

And where does that leave me, sweltering beneath my Grandfather's home, opening up my eyes to this world where I don't have someone to even sleep on the top bunk?  She leaves me terrified and hopeless.  She leaves me defeated and bleeding.  Walking into a mailbox every day.  Forced to do the thing she wants, without any room to break it.

Karla Davis is my friend.  She's goofy and sometimes callous, sometimes warm.  I learned to feel her outside of puberty and outside of the basement, and outside of that foggy rectangle of glass.  She isn't part of my dream.  She isn't part of anything.  There is a monster at the end of this book and the loves I feared and clinged to aren't even part of the wall I've built.

Life goes by casually and I stand on the porch trying to make sense of it all.  And my heart pounds.

Next.