I was a brat,
tender age of 13.
My CD player
was filled with country,
musicals,
Madonna.

I was naive,
had never known pain.
Had never known much
beyond my own word processor.

My brother,
the true computer geek
in our house,
introduced me
to this foreign concept
called the 'internet'.
I shrugged and turned away
until he showed me
just what you could do.

Well,
I wreaked havoc
with melodrama
in any interactive site
I could get people's attention,
and I read millions
of trashy horror stories,
all a bit too twisted
for such a young girl.

I was so feisty and childish
and (of course) always right.
I would talk to any author
I came across that I liked.
When they responded,
I usually got scared
by pretentious vocabularies
and never tried again.

Upon the finding
of a wonder(?) called Tumours,
I decided I liked this guy
with a weird last name.
Told him as much
in an eager email,
then months passed
and my child's attention span
forgot he had ever existed.

That very September,
a sheepish reply came.
Sorry he hadn't answered,
but it was his university account,
and he had been home all summer.
He didn't understand
why I liked his work so much,
and he accepted gracefully
when I forced my own at him.

We were both
so very young,
though I younger than he
(and I suppose
that can't ever change,
though maturity levels
tend to flip and flop around).
He had religious hangups.
I was stuck up and closed minded.
He was a hardcore metalhead
who could never act on
his angry bitter thoughts.
I was a girl
who wrote about suicide
while crying to formulaic
country songs.

Things changed
when I was almost 14,
and I got the news
of my best friend's suicide.
Suddenly there was nothing left,
and the empty space
was slowly crept in on
by none other than who I then called
Chmielecki.

In 9th grade,
I told my girlfriends I was
going to marry him.
One looked at me wryly
and asked if he knew that yet.
The answer was no,
but I wouldn't let a little thing like that
keep me down.

He found himself a faraway love,
and I took to pouting a lot.
Our friendship still grew,
and we fed off each other's music,
but I was spiteful;
still a little brat.

Nine Inch Nails was our strongest bond.
Angry and desperate and sad and confused.
Had I not been 15,
I would have understood better
that this could never bode well
for my wishes and dreams.

A fragment of him
appeared in all my stories;
his music,
our age gap,
anything I could slip past him.
Some things that were blatant,
though those stories quickly died.
A few accusing poems,
then I grew out of that too.

He needed me then.
His faraway love
had broken apart.

He moved to California
and I dreamed he moved to Calgary.
I was 16,
and my greatest worries
were my own self-obsessed depressions.
I fell in love
with a prep-skate band geek,
and threw myself at Mike
every time I got hurt.
I tried to date
a neurotic metalhead,
and that ended badly,
with him in the psych ward.

Mike and I had been using the words
I love you
since sometime in the second year,
but it was then
that he started to panic over the meaning.
It almost seemed like a lie to him,
like pseudo-lovers
that could never be.
Being as feisty as I always was,
I got defensive
and it became a fight.
I put our friendship on the line
to get him to back down.

It ended well,
though difficultly.
It seems I have a knack
for getting my way.
It was on June 29th that he gave in,
and I was finally granted
our more-than-friends.

It was a clumsy transition,
though now two years past.
We have been together
in mind, body, heart and soul.
In September,
we've been in each other's lives
for six amazing
(if conflicted)
years.

I'm still a feisty brat.

[This message has been edited by Anvrill (07-23-2002 10:08 PM).]

For in much wisdom is much grief
& he who increases knowledge
    increases sorrow...
                  Eccl. 1:18