ISSUE 008
Romantisme Nouveau
May 24, 2024 | by Madeline Gaeta
Our first everything was soft and mellow and caked in the tender awkwardness of living something for the first time. He was always soft and mellow and tender. Even now, I don’t picture his face to have been his face. It seems so many years ago that we laid inside of our teenage fleshiness and held each other’s faces fondly, staring into the other’s eyes with wonder and curiosity and the rosiness of our naïve love.
I miss the days when I’d slide my body into the at-the-time big enough crack of the front row desk of my high school English class and set my eyes on my favorite teacher for the mere hour per day I’d get the delight of listening to her words.
I can’t remember now what I talked about or laughed about or thought about with my friends. We’ve woven in and out, mainly out, of each other’s lives now — I do think back on them fondly — but I cannot remember the core, heart or being of any of those relationships. I suppose it is that they were just meant to teach me something, to let me breathe a little, to suffocate me, to pry my eyes open or to close them — a meeting, a coexistence, a brief and platonic love affair that I narcissistically hope I’d let go with enough of a lingering kiss that they won’t forget me. I know that isn’t the case.
As for the love I’d felt, the only time I’ve ever been in love to date — god, let us hope I find another in the near future — has left enough of a lingering bite that’s scarred over and over and over again, somewhere on my body that’s tender and soft and mellow. It was all-consuming. Looking back, my face flushes with humiliation, but also with a certain kind of understanding for that version of me that only he and I share.
We’d drive aimlessly in the midst of that unmistakable, glowing, envy-inducing, teenage naiveté that, these days, I crave even the slightest glimmer of. It was so all-consuming, parasitic, even, that the books would stack themselves on top of my head, piling so high that, though my neck felt threatened enough to snap in half, I’d refocus myself and see only his face beneath the weight.
I struggle to recall the things the two of us talked about, the things we shared that didn’t surround our mouths melting into one another or running our fingers on the freshly washed and window-sun-baked bare skin of the other. Though I am certain we have nothing in common now besides the bubble-esque little town we grew up in, I can’t remember if we ever did in the first place.
All of it, everything whirl-winding together, that love, the perfect haven of untouchable-ness, confidence, that somehow I was more grown then, more sure of myself then than I am now; it’s intoxicating.
Reaching for that virgin laughter that had already felt so much — known so much — but at the same time, nothing at all. The kind of laughter that was reserved for my 14-year-old basement sleepovers or corner-huddled inside jokes, classroom disruptions, school bus text messages and the wide-eyed, apple-faced carelessness of pure youth.
That magic still exists somewhere, and maybe it’s not within me anymore, maybe that piece of me has come and gone in a wink.
The piece of me that kissed the trust in other peoples’ hands, believed so wholeheartedly that “IT WOULDN’T HAPPEN TO ME,” smashed my face into a birthday cake because I wanted to — a birthday cake that was the centerpiece of all of my friends and family gathered in the nooks and crannies of our home-cooked kitchen. The piece of me that would wake up on Sunday mornings to the smell of pancakes and bacon and the gurgling coffee pot, the four of us warmed around the table. The part of me that laid to rest with the two old friends I don’t talk to as much anymore, the two that shared the backseat of my old and buried burnt green Honda Element. The three of us would laugh and laugh and laugh about boys and stupidness and paint our faces with makeup together, kiss our reflections in the mirror and tell each other how much we loved one another. I miss the me that ate sticky peaches for breakfast next to my sister on our back porch, promptly followed by lazy summertime afternoons reserved for sunning ourselves and laughter.
Most of all, I miss driving seconds for miles to be at my best friend’s doorstep, the reassuring pen marks of my favorite teacher, the comfort of the big white church on the corner. I miss the soft envelopment of my grandparents’ backyard, running my legs to catch the end of summer heatwaves at my neighborhood crystallized pool. I miss mom and dad being steps down the hallway and the winter snow angels and hot chocolate spills and crying because I was confused and thinking, believing, so whole-heartedly, that my dad could protect me from anything. I miss the first time I met her and metaphorically stitching my name into every one of her sweatshirts as I confusingly stumbled into love with her. I miss her bedroom in her parents’ old and beautiful house. It was pink, pink and soft and glowing and everything had her name all over it. Her quiet and beautiful genius was everywhere.
There’s a hole in my chest that these memories keep falling out of. Driving with the windows down at nighttime, swerving under the influence of the staggering discovery of ’70s classic rock. Taping my own eyes open to pour the contents of my textbooks into my head and praying to whoever that they’d stick.
In coming home, I am reminded that the piece of me that feels most whole lives there.
Maybe it’s the mere insignificance of it all, or rather, the mere insignificance of me — the me I’d known in this town. Every time I come home, there’s this pit that sinks to the bottom of my stomach, grows an inch for each day that I live here again, swells just enough to prick the underside of my heart. Perhaps it’s there to remind me of the bittersweetness — that now I can only recall as sweetness — of what once was, or so I notice how tall everyone had gotten. And again, how short everyone had gotten. How somehow, in the six years since I’ve lived in the greige house, my heart had found a way to swell 10 sizes bigger — 10 sizes bigger and still with the same insatiable taste to be bitten and loved solidly. Though I haven’t actually felt that in, coincidentally enough, the same amount of time.
Somehow I now have wrinkle lines next to my mouth, and the glimmer that once followed me everywhere has long since passed away. She’s gone to find herself another apple-faced pretty teenager to shine on.
I miss the constant ache in my thighs and holing up in my bedroom to write essays and the creaks of my childhood bed and the way that everything was preserved in this … first time-ness that was beautiful and raw; my brain never wanted any of it to end.
The wonder of really living something for the first time. I want it all again and again and again.
This is a web-exclusive Issue 008 project.
Writing: Madeline Gaeta
Graphics: Emma Sulfsted
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