Drill Team Garbage

I am eighteen and the years of adulthood weigh heavy on my shoulders. I turn the legal age and all of a sudden realize in a simple moment that everything is changing. I will soon be moving out-of-state to go to school to double major in English with an emphasis on creative writing and political science, into an unfamiliar city not plagued with the same hypocrisy and judgment Mormonville, Idaho has indoctrinated with me, and for the first time, I will open my wings and fly as I will truly be free.

However, like said, this freedom weighs heavy.

Heavier is the transience I’ve experienced in the last eight months. I quit my drill team, even though it consumed the majority of my high school career, as it was the source of most of my woes and detrimental to my mental health. In this I lost all of the friends I’d thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. All of a sudden, I was out of this picture when it came to being a bridesmaid to helping raise their children.

In this, my one constant was my love. He held my hand and guided me through all of it. I looked over at him in the driver’s seat of his car – even on the night when we got in our car accident – and saw sunshine. I had a heat stroke, he set up a circle of room fans in his living room and gave me ice cream and let me sit in between them just to regulate my body temperature. He regarded me putting on my shoes and laughed, “You’re a dimepiece. And don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. Damnnnn,” and I laughed because I only believed him partway, but still appreciated that after all of this time he regarded me as attractive. However, sunshine doesn’t last forever, and the storms came at the beginning of June when both of us started to realize just how bad we were for the other. It ended as such: it was a Thursday, and I went over to his apartment where we laid in his bed for the last time and I felt so much finality in his arms. We discussed conspiracy theories about the Denver airport and both of us fell quiet before he pulled me on top of him and we shared the most passion and intimacy we ever would. I should have kissed him a little harder if I’d really known this would be our last time. I did things I regret, he did things I’m sure he regrets, and at the end of the night when my dad texted me asking where I was at one in the morning I left without ever kissing him goodbye. I simply looked at him from behind my car door while he stood in the doorframe of his duplex and I laughed, “You’ll figure out how you feel about me. One way or the other, you’ll know. Goodbye.”

We broke up the next week over the phone while I was at a state-wide mock government session in the state’s capital and it was so sticky hot that my thighs stuck to the mattress pad as I cried myself to sleep. I never found love in this city. I suppose I blame this city for everything that happens in my life, but if you lived here, you’d get it.

So you see my dilemma: I go into the summer with a meager handful of friends left, as my best friends left me in an instant. I’d depended so much on my boyfriend that it drove him to damn near insanity and he shattered me. So, you see how I dealt with it: I got so close to the girls in my city that it hurt realizing that my new best friends lived hours away in real life. I let myself get suspended in time and I replay the night where Haily stayed in the bathroom while I showered and we discussed our lives in what was then the present over, and over, and over again. It’s all just a supercut, as Lorde said in the album that got me through my breakup – but it’s a supercut I want to keep and hold somewhere in my chest, close to my still-beating heart.

When I got back home, I had a week, and then I left for Japan. In that week I met up once more with my love and we discussed my time at girls state and just talked. My shitty stick-shift car climbed up one of our city’s hills and we looked out over the yellow night lights and I looked over at him as I heard his laugh for the last time and realized from the pit of my stomach that, yes, this was the last time. But we were broken up, so I didn’t do anything to test my limits, and I drove him back to his place as soon as his sister/roommate called asking where he’d gone.

The same week, I went to my first official high-school party. My best friend is a hardcore partier – but seeing as I was raised LDS, wanted to protect my purity. However, I’d thrown virtue out the window in the face of my love, and intended to keep it that way. A boy I’d grown up with sat next to me as they passed out drinks and put his hand on my thigh and I can still smell the stench of his breath as he whispered in my ear Lyssa you’re so drunk even though I stayed squeaky-clean sober that night. I later locked myself in a bedroom with a few of my older coworkers as they hotboxed, and I couldn’t drive myself home, and called him. I cried for a solid twenty minutes in his car about how I wanted to marry him but our love wouldn’t last considering we’d broken up. He said goodbye to me and that was the last time I saw his smile.

I got on my fourth plane and saw the veins of my city with my own eyes, the rolling hills of Idaho turn into the flat plains of Wyoming and then Denver. From Denver we crossed the Pacific and for the first time in my life I watched the waves roll beneath me as opposed to in front of me, the great big encapsulating blue overtook me as I waited and waited to hit the ground. And once I did, the gooey, humid air choked me out so much that I spit my gum out by accident in the Tokyo-Narita airport (no joke). Then we got on yet another plane where I listened to Lorde’s Melodrama on repeat and swore to myself that I wouldn’t fall back into him, and I wouldn’t let love into my heart ever again, and I forced myself to stare at the boy across the aisle from me who was tall and nice enough and sort of funny and one of the last remainders of home I held in a foreign country.

My host family was an elderly couple who loved me intensely. Everything about Japan, I experienced in this fashion – I was loved so, so intensely, that some mornings, it hurt my chest when I woke up on my futon on the floor. My body learned to get used to waking up at three in the morning thanks to the sparrows singing outside my window and go to sleep by eight o’clock before my host father even got home from his work at the local kindergarten. I kissed my second boy while there, on a dare, and felt the surge of rebelliousness once more but not occupied by the same deep connection. I called my parents every day in the morning as I’d do my makeup in the wooden vanity – I see my room in Japan as I close my eyes – and then I’d eat breakfast. Konno-San was an amazing cook. I tested my Japanese skills and proved myself proficient enough to earn a dinner with the Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) through the JET Programme, the field of work I plan to go into immediately after graduating college.

I close my eyes once more and I hear the opening strums of Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know The Better” and see lush Japan forest. I hear the psychobabble of our Japanese chaperones in front of us, and the laughter of my group speaking in English, and the rumble of the bus as it takes us everywhere one can imagine on the island of Hokkaido. I saw the lowest of lows, and the highest of highs, that Japan could offer me.

Just the same I see one in the morning there and my eyes are bloodshot. I’ve been on the phone with him for three hours now and neither of us have resolved anything. “I get it,” I finally tell him. “But I can’t come back to you.”

“Why?” he asks me in his characteristic hush. My love remains so quiet, to this day. Perhaps I simply wanted to break his silence.

“Because it’s one in the morning in Japan, (name), and you haven’t been on the other side of the bed in a month and I miss you so much but I have too much damn pride. I’m in love with you, and you know it too, and it’s not worth any of it anymore. We’ll find other people out there. And if we end up finding each other again? Cool, I guess. But for now, because I couldn’t secure you being there for me when I couldn’t be there for myself, I’m not going to be picturing you in my life any longer.”

And he sighed. And hung up. And then called me back in tears.

I went home and the month of August flew by. My host sister, Setona, became one of my closest friends. I miss her so dearly. I went to party after party, staying sober in the name of my Savior but watching as other girls passed out on the street and boys ruined their own life with the same two fingers they’d use later that month to catch the winning pass at the home-opener football game. I tried to ignore when he asked me how my college classes were going, seeing as I only take three official high school courses and spend the rest of my afternoon at the state university of my hometown, but always ended up answering him. Then, on his birthday, we cut ties completely. I cut myself bangs and a new lifestyle.

The same boy from the party? You remember him? I’d grown up in his presence. I’d spent nights in the summer between my sophomore and junior year lusting over him, but never doing anything about it, as I was preoccupied with a Mormon boy who would later go on to hate me and later, Cameron, the sign of the times when it came to my sadness. He and I started to talk. He took me on a date and I hadn’t been on a first date in six months and frantically texted my mock-government city asking for help on what I should wear. We played golf and he nervously laughed at all of my bad puns. I could see the end as it began. He played Ed Sheeran when I showed him the water tower, where he thought he was going to get laid by the baddest Mormon at school, and instead, I simply took his hand in mine and forced him to consider the totality of our pretty little city underneath us. When I thought things were getting too serious I forced him to take me to a mutual friend’s house and we played Wii Sports like we were little kids again and we kissed summer goodbye.

He asked me to homecoming. I thought This Is It – with my new hairstyle, and my new boyfriend, I’d surely cut my love out completely. But I couldn’t help but lay in the dark and just thinkthinkthink about every moment I’d spent at his side in the dark. People always question if he and I were together just for sex, and to this, I laugh. If my love had wanted sex he would’ve found somebody else. My love, instead, was patient enough to wait a month for our first kiss, four months for us to even start doing anything, and five to realize it would end in flames. I knew he loved me. He’d planned a future for us wherein he’d finish out school and move to Montana around my junior year of college, and then we’d go to Japan together and have our first child there so they could be raised speaking two languages as opposed to one. And as I’m sitting across the table from my friend, I’m remembering this. My friend pays for our dinner and takes me back to his house and lays me down on his bed the same way my love had months ago. And he kisses me with the same passion and fury that I’d kissed my love but I felt nothing. I felt so hollow as his lips moved from mine to my neck and I didn’t even feel so impassioned as to tell him to stop when he got too far. He held my hand on the car ride home and my brain tried to tell my heart to stop crossing its arms and being a little bitch, but my heart just sank.

We made out once more, and then, kissed before homecoming and once again immediately following the dance. The last time I’d see the face of my love was during the homecoming festivities, actually, in which I went into his coffee shop in my dress with my best friend and ordered a straight black coffee. He looked at me odd – he knew I didn’t order coffee – but made it for us anyways. I later would spit it up all over my cream-colored dress at the bitterness of its taste. His one last word of revenge.

My homecoming date and I fizzled out once I realized he’d never fully come, or care to, understand my complexities. The idea of my sexual assault was something so arbitrary to him that he didn’t even consider asking me if what he was doing was okay, but I thought it was love so I never stopped him. Even worse he hated who I was for my mental illness, said that I was crazy and erratic because of my anxiety and to that I can’t blame him.

Because on Thursday night, a month removed from homecoming, my mom took a bottle of pills in her hand and threatened to overdose. My dad took them from her and they fought out of the range of my little sisters, however, both gave me their stories of the incident when I got home from debate practice. And I had a panic attack on the bus. And I said things I shouldn’t’ve, because my coaches called the school which led to a full-scale investigation. And I ruined my parents’ lives. And I ruined the life of the boy who I went to homecoming with who I cut off because I realized I didn’t love him and so now he tells everyone we had sex because he know how deeply it will cut me. I ruined the life of my love when I didn’t fight him on breaking up, and I let him walk out of my life as I walked out of his, and even though we both claim to the other that we’re better off now I know for damn well sure I’m not. And I’m waiting to ruin the next life, because, inevitably, that’s all I can do.

And I guess, now, in my eighteenth year, I’m just trying to make peace with all of my broken pieces. Every day I replay the last eight months in my head and long for the day when I could somehow just go back to my first date with my love when he took me to breakfast, or our first kiss mid-April, or one of the days where he’d pick me up and we’d drive off into oblivion as an excuse to soak in the presence of one another. I’d go back and fix my parents’ relationship, I’d make sure I wouldn’t completely lose it so that their mental health woudn’t be at risk and I no longer would be at fault for the downfall of their marriage. I’d go back and protect my sisters from the girls who’d call one of them fat in the high school hallways and my former drill teammates who push them into lockers and laugh when they burst out into tears.

In my head, I do everything right.

I believe in the LDS church. It was the church in which I was raised. Every Sunday is as repetitious as the last -- fresh poison each week, I wake up to get all dressed up to sit in a congregation that has watched me grow week from week. From Sunday services where kindergarten Lyssa would fold her legs up in an unladylike fashion to the Tuesday night activities junior-class Lyssa makes up excuses to skip, these people have raised me.

However, this comes with facets of it that I struggle with.

The rules that have similarly kept me safe but clipped my wings become harder to follow every single day. Loving myself comes only with the more of my body I show, something strictly prohibited, something I find sick pleasure as I watch people stare at me down the street or boys at my workplace stumble over their words when looking me up and down. Desire is a complete different thing as I’ve never felt emotion as humanly intense as I do for my love, but my church teaches me to push it down. Every kiss feels like sin but I keep going back for more and more and more -- and we haven’t had sex which I’m constantly being told is a sin second only to murder, but DAMN DO WE DO OTHER THINGS THAT MAKE ME FEEL UNHOLY. someone talk to me about this bc I wish I could explain it better without the whole internet knowing lol

My body is a temple and I want to line it with art. I’ve always been fascinated by tattoos and the permanence they embody, and with this fascination comes ideas for my own I have built up in my head but could feasibly never get. (for the record, my best friend Alexis and I intend to mark our bodies with the constellation of Libra for it dictates who we are and our friendship. I want “light of my life, fire of my loins” down my arm or across my rib. I want song lyrics and watercolor flowers)

The hypocrisy is really what gets me, I suppose. The same girls who I see laid out on a sofa with Jack Daniels in their hands on Saturday night glance over at me during Sacrament Meeting the next morning with hate in their eyes over knowing I’ve gotten to third base with my boyfriend. Judgement spreads through my tiny little Mormon community like wildfire, wherein if somebody fucks up, everyone knows about it. God forbid anyone make a mistake. “Have they transgressed?” is a constant question asked about couples with full sincerity -- since maybe if they’ve fucked, everyone will feel better about their sins, too -- but is it their place to judge? Furthermore, why hate what you don’t understand?

It’s none of your damn business who I put my lips on or otherwise. If it’s a boy or a girl, it shouldn’t matter. Why should it matter if the boy that I love shares the same values? By your standards, Mormonville, Idaho, as long as we don’t bang in the backseat of my car we’re good -- but heaven forbid I don’t bring him to church with me on Sunday. 

I imagine a perfect church being much like a hospital since no one who is healed goes there, and no one who is perfect would attend church services. I want the openly-gay returned missionary to be able to sit next to the girl who has confessed her nasty addiction to pornography, and in the pew ahead, a young couple who struggles with tithing. I want the recovering alcoholic and those who still tussle with worldly sins and struggles to be able to come together under Christ and truly feel the love He has for them and the Atonement He can offer them.

In order to certainly understand who I am now one must understand the circumstances I have seen. Though I may be alive right now to hear the tap-tap-tapping of my acrylic nails against the laptop keyboard, if one of my suicide attempts -- especially the most recent, in January, in which I swallowed a handful of sleeping meds to be found on the bathroom floor crumpled at the feet of the toilet as my body tried to rid itself of the toxins I’d forced into it -- had been successful, I wouldn’t be.

It’s been five years since I was sexually assaulted, though it continues to haunt me as it did in my younger days. I still wake up screaming, no matter how long removed I am from the situation. However, these moments are now fewer and far between that I bolt out of my sheets still shaking. My actions are born from the trauma I endured in a middle school hallway at age twelve with my first “boyfriend” of sorts having been extremely emotionally, mentally, and occasionally physically abusive.

 Cameron was an era in my life that marked the sign of the times. I was older and I wanted to attract the boys who looked over me with hungry lust in my eyes, and with him being one year my senior and equally as mentally ill he was an easy target. He watched my shapely legs during every dance performance and licked his lips as he said my name. There were episodes of manic jealousy and fury when he thought I was cheating, or faking the mental illness I was diagnosed with in grade four, or became defensive and recoiled when I told him to make up his mind about what he wanted. There were periods where he told me I’d be an amazing wife to somebody, he wanted to see me in white dresses and wedding veils and celebrate this mortal existence with me for the rest of his. 

I was confused and hurt by this, as well as the drama from my dance team, which motivated me to a single and very serious suicide attempt on January 21st, 2017, since which I have washed my hands of the self-destructive tendencies that used to plague me. My scars have faded from my hips and my legs so much that now, when someone new runs his hands up and down my thighs, he doesn’t notice them.

This boy is another new sign of the times and everything I expected myself to revile. If I were a year removed from this situation, I surely would have chased my love away as quickly as he started chasing me.

He and I are similar in synchronicity and style. While the kids at school think I’m a bad Mormon, the easy dancer, equal parts crazy and slutty, he sees none of it because he is a legal adult only fourteen months my senior and lives for himself in-and-out of college classes at the state university in my hometown. He doesn’t share my religion, which concerns me, because I’ve fallen for him in the clumsy way that Humbert Humbert fell for Annabel in his princedom by the sea. My days and nights are occupied by him, every second of every hour.

Together we repair the damage done to one another. Girls in the past left him emotionally scarred so I have done my best to meet his demands and just listen to my quiet lover when he starts to quaver. I take him in my arms and I let him, for the first time in his life, be the vulnerable one. Everything in me reassures him and wants to be better for him and him alone. He, on the other hand, does the same -- and has picked me up at three in the morning when I am having a panic attack just so he knows I don’t reach for the blades I’m so accustomed to. He fills the holes other boys had poked in me from ages when I was too young to truly understand the gravity of what was happening to me. With his hands the scarification smooths over and I feel completely sheltered in his touch. I’m scared to let my parents know exactly how I feel about him considering he is a direct mirror image of my father, from a theological and personal perspective, and they will surely think me foolish to have fallen in love with him over a course of four months.

I met him in the winter of my life but with him both of us are in blooming color. Our eyes first met when he was an apprentice photographer for a photoshoot I was modeling at. Nervously he taught me how to play the guitar and run my calloused fingers against the frets, next moment he was tearing off my blouse and I was begging him to let me stay the night just so I could rest in the comfort his heartbeat provides me. He’s stopped his nasty habits for me. When he first decided he’d committed to loving little old religious me, he put down the blunts and alcohol that had saved him previously and swore it off in my name. He researches my religion and though he doesn’t fully understand it, wishes to, simply to understand the far reaches of my mind better. He keeps himself up to read my writing and exhausts himself to better make me feel his love. 

My writing is the next point entirely. I’ve graduated the lazy plotlines my thirteen-year-old self dreamed about. My current manuscript is fueled by the hypocrisy my religion has exposed to me, the people that have similarly loved and loathed me, and myself. It’s called Two Of Us. It is as though I have intravenously let my blood spill onto the pages, as well as my sin, my sorrows, my soul. One day when I am brave enough I will share it for the weak-minded girls like the one you all knew from three years ago to remind them that living is worth it. 

Because it is.