“Honey Pie, you are making me crazy/ I’m in love but I’m lazy/ So won’t you please come home”

Honey Pie, hold hands with me as I drive with my tortoise shell sunglasses and stringy hair out the window, and you stick your other hand out the window, playing with the wind because I begged you to do so. I want you to see the early September sun at 6:42 pm, shining through the still green trees because this feeling, this beauty makes gold look like a fool. Honey Pie, I want you in the car with me, slightly unstable, as we pass through a neighborhood that the sun makes look like a fairytale forest where the pretty princess is out in a nice, self reflective afternoon collecting silver lilies. Love feels good, Honey Pie.

The whole 22 minutes it takes for me to get back from the ice rink, I blast Metallica tunes at 30. I drive slowly-ish so that the car in front of me doesn’t get too annoyed with my music. But as they say, nothing else matters. I crank up the volume. I finally understand why people tell me I have major “Only Child Syndrome”. I am selfish, disregarding the houses I’m passing with children trying to sleep and drivers on the road just trying to enjoy their evening. How is it that whenever I’m mad I still worry? Not like I’m gonna change my behavior. I crank up the volume again. “Nothing Else Matters!” I open the window. Car is bouncing and I think about all of those bouncing cars with drivers I wanted to curse at in the past. I am one of them now, wholly consumed by the music. It’s like waves coming at me constantly, chaos. I’m dizzy now, from the lemon Luna bar and the speeding. The music makes me feel like I’m in a bubble, comfortable, hugged. Hugged by you. It lightens the anger, thinking of you hugging me. I think of you putting your warm hand on top of my shaky hand, comforting me as I scream guttural screams, wiping the tears from my red cheeks, just like you did on our first date when I took an hour to drive to a place fifteen minutes away, when I nearly got us killed. I think of you lowering the volume, because it is the nice thing to do and right now, I’m incapable of doing the nice thing. I put the music back to 16 because I know you wouldn’t want me to let my anger get the best of me. You think I’m better than that. Besides, it’s rude to wake up children so late on a weekday.

I rant about something, again, and you listen, like you always do, and I apologize and apologize and then you call me Honey Pie and I stop. Feels good, someone knowing what to do with me for once, someone caring for me so greatly in the way I want to be cared for. I text you (“I love you”) and add the red heart Emojum next to it. Honestly, it makes me a little nervous, even though I have said the big three words before. It’s just that you usually say it first and I sometimes respond, when I feel like it. Feels natural that way, considering I only started recently saying it. You text back (“I love you too”), also with the red heart Emojum, and I smile and think about all the homework I still have to do. 

I get my senior pictures back. I took them at the art museum… how basic of me. My eyes look really small, enveloped by the folds of fat forming above my cheekbones. My knees have a sack of stubborn fat, left side on the left knee and right side on the right knee, and I think about the terrible combination of my non-protruding knee caps and my ultra pale skin. So close to looking like my mother’s worst nightmare. Now I just need a scary amount of spider veins. I smile with just a top row of teeth in all of the photos so my cheeks puff out like a chipmunk, even though I’m seventeen, and the sides of my nose are lifted and the bottom is pointed and my nose looks like it takes up a good fourth of my face. Why couldn’t I have gotten my mother’s button nose, rather than some weird hybrid between her nose and my father’s big, crooked German nose? I know it’s bad and that I’m being fake but I make a list of what I want the photographer to photoshop. It takes up half a page. You tell me to stop when I tell you about the list and I send you the photos to prove the legitimacy of my concerns. Though it’s over text, I can tell you are desperately trying to persuade me (“You’re so, so pretty”; “You look so happy”; “You are my Honey Pie”). I can tell that you really do believe the words you are saying. You text that you wish you said these words more often because it’s so true and you want me to know more than anything. You help me see that it’s not so bad. I think I’m only going to ask for smoothing on my kneecaps and a more angular jawline.

I have collected two Golf Balls in the span of four days in the floral backpack I bought at a Bratislavan marketplace for $13 that I never use. Of the Golf Balls, one is white, one is gray blue. The white one I got on my father’s birthday when I hung out with you instead of my father. We were at The Park near my house, a pit stop before the conclusion of our second date. As we walked over to a plot of grass, far from the kids innocently screaming on the playground, I spotted the white Golf Ball, “Noodle 3”, and then we laid down in the grass in each other's arms, me stroking your heavenly Herbal Essences Hair as you whispered into my ear (“You are my Honey Pie”). What would I even use it for, other than a memory of this simple moment of me giggling at the shapeless clouds next to your sweaty, jolly face? The gray blue one I got on a school trip. 11:27 pm, listening to “Love Sosa” in the heavy, warm rain and utter darkness as I skipped, arm in arm, with my friend across the slicked parking lot. Her speaker got messed up (“Shiitttt”) and I was glancing around, furiously, for adults who might scream at us until their eyes popped out. I looked at the lightning lighting the sky purple and told her that I loved you… more like puked out the words. She was the first person to ever hear my feelings for you (“Awww I’m so happy for you”). I picked up a Golf Ball near the sewer and held it close to my heart. I said I was going to tell you sometime soon, in person, whenever that would be. I would tell you when we were on Cloud 9 together, when the words were aching through my veins, pounding my skin to be let out. I grinned as I trotted through the thick puddles because I loved you and I had only realized it then. I think I’m going to start collecting Golf Balls. 

I write about you and me, all of myselves, all of yourselves, in my journal (diary). I dissect and prod all of our conversations, cherish our Small Moments because that’s what brilliant, infatuated people do. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel or why I feel something and I study your ways, trying to learn and understand you, almost as much as I study my ways. We’re social experiments, you and me. Me and you. If I told someone else that, about these odd ways, our odd ways together, what would they say? You say I think too much but you think it’s Cute and I say that I think I need normalcy cleansing and resent that I can’t just erase this… these thought parasites, these Alien Ideas from my mind. You don’t think it’s weird, for now, but I’m always afraid of the moment when you run away from me because it’s just too much. You egg me on (“Try me”) to share these potentially I-need-to-break-up-with-you Alien Ideas and I do and you’re… ok. You’re ok. Maybe you’re weirded out, I don’t know because I can’t see your face, but you’re ok and I’m ok to share another, someday. 

I never thought I’d let you change me this much. I am Stubborn, as you often remark, a true Taurus. I dragged my heels against change but it happened anyway and I lost that bet that I was better, stronger than love. I certainly never thought that I would write about my first love and especially now and before college, even though I promised my five year old self I wouldn’t date until I turned twenty, but my life course has shifted drastically. I’m not the annoying, immature, no personality freshman sitting in the front row of Honors Precalculus anymore. Now I’m just… melodramatic and somewhat human and senior. I keep thinking about myself from years ago. She would cringe at the prospects of writing about you, thinking about you all the time. But she never had you. She never knew how addictive you are. She never knew that you were the smile engraved on my plastic mask.

I want to do homework but all I can do is think about you, wanting to be in your arms, smelling your delightful Herbal Essences Hair rather than reading a biology textbook. I feel myself getting angry at you for being on my mind and I want to text you that but then I think about how I have to do work to catch up with your intelligence, to live up to your standards of us being top of the class at our schools. I want to study biology now. I am enthralled by water and hydrogen bonds. We text later, as we always do because now I am a Good Texter since I ditch my other responsibilities for just a bit more time with you. You tell me that just the thought of me makes you go crazy, that you were thinking about me, and I tell you that I’m starting to feel the same way. You might’ve had an eight month start of this level of distraction and infatuation, caring for me from afar before you asked me out, but I’m gaining on you. Love, as we agreed on, is a Logarithmic Function.

“Honey Pie, you are making me crazy…”