Blogging from Wheaton College in Mass right now folks. That's right, I'm at Wheaton, partying it up college kid style, and I still had the love and consideration to write you a post. Actually I've had this particular Fiction Friday waiting around for a few days to post until Friday came around but shh don't tell anyone that. Right now I just look like a really awesome blogger. (To be fair, it was a struggle and a half to get the stupid internet here to work and finally I just resorted to posting from my best friend's computer.) So here it is! Enjoy! Sorry that not nearly a generous enough amount of editing was done.
Disillusionment and Sofia Vergara
He. His name is Jonas and he sits across from me in a cafeteria booth- the same cafeteria booth, but I don't tell him that. His eyes are ice blue shards that glint in the sunlight streaming across his crooked face. His face that is always half-shadowed, as if some mysterious, dark presence has settled and made its home there.
His long fingers tease at the burnt edges of a sesame-seed bagel: toasted, but dry, as he tells me how he lost his faith. He speaks of it as though it is a tangible thing, like a locket, something he held in his hand and felt the cool smooth weight of, until one day, he just lost it.
He was in high school at the time. He is not looking at me when he says this, rather looking out the window, and the unflinching sunlight bathing his figure feels garish at a time like this. This is serious. This is somber. The shadows on Jonas' face are darker than usual. And the stupid dumbass sun keeps shining in, intruding on this moment. Such a romantic moment, I think shallowly. Bon Iver ought to be playing in the background.
He took some classes at the local college. Most of the kids in his high school did; it was encouraged. This is when he lost the locket- his faith I mean.
It just didn't make sense anymore, he is saying to me, and his skinny fingers move to circling the rim of his half-empty orange juice glass. My faith- I realized that my faith was a sham. It was just ignorance.
And it was frightening. He has not said that part, not so explicitly, but I can see it on the shadows on his face, in the flickering of his eyes. It was frightening the first time he realized it might not all be true. I know this without him actually verbalizing it. I have been there before.
It was when I told my parents I was bisexual, and in doing that, renounced everything they had ever taught me, everything I had ever known. In their eyes, you couldn't be bisexual and still have a piece of their faith. It wasn't possible. I knew that being bisexual meant that I couldn't hold onto my faith anymore. I still believed in God. That was a knowledge that had been inescapably ingrained in my brain since infancy. But faith- faith was something I couldn't cling to anymore. I ran away. I had to run away.
Jonas is talking now, about how glad he is. I'm glad I know though. He makes sure that my eyes are hitched with his eyes while he says this. As sad as it is, to realize everything you believed was a lie, it's better to know. I'd rather know. And I still believe in God, you know. Maybe someday, I'll come back to it all. But for now, I'm glad I know.
He drains the cup of orange juice.
I agree with what he has said. It is sad. He feels that he has won something with his knowledge, but really, I think that he has lost. I think this for a brief moment, before I am distracted by the sesame seed that has found its way to his outer lip. I want to lean forward and lick it off, or perhaps remove it with my teeth, so carefully, barely grazing their hard shellacked edges with the softness of his skin.
He sees my gaze then and smiles, softly. Perhaps he knows, knows how much his disillusionment has enchanted me. I am a writer; I can't help but be drawn to his woundedness, his brokenness. His brooding, dark, mysteriously veiled face. I want to help him. But I can't because I don't have the answers myself.
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Jonas told me once that he thought Sofia Vergara was beautiful. He said it in a mild way, offhandedly. He was not graphic, did not go into the details about what he would like to do to her, if he could get with her. He just said she was beautiful. He liked the way she looked.
It made my heart ache in that way it always does when someone I think is beautiful talks about how beautiful someone else is. In that moment, the only thing I wanted in the whole entire world was to be Sofia Vergara. And wasn't that a stupid thought. If I was Sofia Vergara, I would not be here. I would not even know Jonas. The type of men that I could have- well that's just it, they would be men, not disillusioned boys, not like Jonas. I would be far and away from this place. I would not be scared. I would have a grip on my life. I would not be so desperately enamored of this sad little boy with his deep voice and daring dispassion. And I would have that idiotic accent. That woman has some body, but man I hate her accent.
I told him that, when he said how much he liked Sofia. I told him her accent was dumb. He smiled at that, and my heart warmed, though I had ordered it not to. But I can't help it when it comes to Jonas. Little pieces of my heart warm at all the things he does. At the way his voice is so much deeper than you would expect it to be and at the way he seems all apathetic about everything in the world but he's still really smart and he works hard and gets good grades in school, and most especially- it warms at the way he smiles at something I've said, even if his smile is making fun of me, like it is now.
You're just jealous he says, and he's completely right and I hate him for that. You shouldn't worry about it. You look just fine. Tabitha.
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My good friend Sarah, who is older and wiser than I am, once told me that I was a lovely girl. You're beautiful, Tabby. Beautiful Tabitha. He had told it to me too, when we were in the booth, touching each other quietly, brokenly. The same booth where Jonas and I had talked about the missing faith. I had touched another boy there, a lonely boy, and he had told me I was beautiful.
But beautiful is a subjective thing. I didn't tell that to him, not in the booth. It wasn't the time for arguments. But I told it to Sarah, because it was true and she knew it and she smiled at me and dropped into my hands a piece of her wisdom.
You are beautiful, and I don't think anyone could miss it. But it's a special kind of beauty. You're beautiful to those who are young. The young, the broken and the disillusioned. They can see the beauty in you, in your rebellion, in the way that you run.
I just wanted Jonas to see the beauty in me, and I told Sarah that.
He does, I think. Jonas knows you're beautiful. He sees that. But you're not- and don't take offense to this Tabitha- you're not the right kind of beautiful. You're the kind of beautiful that he wants to touch, that he wants to feel pressed up against him. You have the beauty whose hips he wants to encircle, whose legs he wants to graze, whose breasts he wants to bury his heartbroken face in. Your lips, your soft hair: this is the beauty that is a balm to his disillusioned soul. You could heal him right now. Your beauty could be what he needs, to find the beauty in everything else again, to find the beauty in the whole, not just the part, to find the beauty in the world. You are a beauty for now, and a beauty for here, and a beauty for this. But you aren't the type of beautiful that he's going to remain enchanted by forever. You aren't- you aren't the type of beautiful he's going to want to take home to mother.
That's fine. I don't want to meet Jonas' mother. Sarah's words don't hurt me, no, they make a lot of sense, really they do. I'm not the girl he brings home to mother. And by he I mean any he. Not just Jonas but all of them, all of the hes in the world he might be enchanted by my beauty. My beauty that exists in my uncertainty, in my rebellion, in my running away.
Jonas is running from God, and that is why my beauty enchants him. That is why my beauty is not something his mother would see, is not something he could share with her, or share for a lifetime. Once he finds God again, and I hope that he will, my beauty will fade into the background of a pure, golden-haired virgin. Home-schooled probably. Never said the f-word in her whole damn life.
But, but, but,
Can't they see this? Can't they see it here, on my face, in my eyes, in my voice that is no longer so afraid?
I am not running anymore.
