#asiablocks

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When people asked her about her mom, she never really knew what to say. She eventually just started saying what was the closest thing to the truth: “She left.” But it didn’t  seem like the whole story. It didn’t seem that simple. But she didn’t want to talk about it and she didn’t want to show weakness and no one ever asked for more information so she never bothered to give anymore. No one asked for a lot of information from you when you were the one with the mother who ran away. Fathers who ran away were way more predictable. Deadbeat fathers were normal. Chris and Nate had horribly pathetic excuses for fathers. But Asia’s father was always there. Solid and dependable, if not exactly close. But her mother…no. Her mother didn’t love her enough to stick around. Her mother was never like her. Not at all. Her mother left her. Asia was a girl without a mother. And she learned to manage that way. There weren’t a lot of pictures of her mother in their whole house. In the entire mansion. But she did keep one of her mother smiling, with flowers in her hair, in her room. She kept it folded up, because she didn’t like to look at it too much. Her mother was truly happy in that picture, but it reminded Asia too much of the reasons why her mother had left. The picture of her mother that Asia could stand to look at a little more often was one of all three of them, her mother, her father, and herself, at her baptism when she was six years old. This one she could stand to look at, because all three of them looked a little solemn in their smiles. And that’s how Asia remembered them all.

Asia loved looking in her mirror. It was a beautiful one, one that her father had bought her for her tenth birthday. She looked in it all the time. That specific one, since she had several mirrors in her room and one huge one in her bathroom and a whole row of huge ones in her basement ballet studio. But the one that made her the happiest was looking in her vanity mirror. It was so beautiful and classic, and it just reminded her of a classic beauty queen. It made her feel like Marilyn Monroe or another old-school Hollywood star. The little lights always made her feel very glamorous. She looked in that mirror every morning, and she always felt unbelievably glamorous. 

Sometimes she misses her mom. She can’t help it, she loved her. She and her mom were never close though. They were just so different. Her mom was always talking about the simpler things in life, and Asia never really got it. She never really understood what her mom was talking about. The trees and the birds and the way things felt alive when you were outdoors with nature all around you. Asia never really got it. She tried sometimes when she was little, but by the time she was nine, she had effectively stopped trying. Her dad bought her anything she wanted, and that made her happy. She loved having new things and feeling beautiful. She loved the power she felt like she had over the other girls whenever she had something new and better. But that same year was the year that her mother fell apart. She couldn’t deal with her family anymore. She hated every part of them. Wilma had thought that her differences from Carl weren’t a big deal. She thought they could work things out. But no matter what she did, Carl didn’t pay a lot of attention to her. He was always out, always on business trips, always having fancy luncheons and things with a lot of official looking people. And it always made her feel a little lonely. Carl was always giving Asia expensive things and a lot of money, and Asia loved it. She enjoyed herself with the same things that her father did, in a way. Money and power. Her mother didn’t though. And eventually, it got to be too much, and Wilma started thinking about the simple life her parents had. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with it. She wanted to be rich the way she had never been growing up. She thought it would make her happier, since she was never happy as a kid. But she realized that money wouldn’t do that for her. She realized that she didn’t love Carl, only what he had represented: success, power, wealth, everything her parents hadn’t been able to give her. She realized that Asia had nothing in common with her, and that Asia would be miserable if she was forced to go live a more simple life with her mother. And so, with nothing but the feeling that she was doing the right thing in her heart, Wilma left, only taking a few personal items. She left everything else, feeling that it wasn’t really hers but Carl’s, and she left a note explaining what she had done. While it left the two remaining Mellinos in shock, Asia and Carl didn’t really talk about it much. He asked her once if she wanted to see a counselor about it, and she said no, that she didn’t think she really needed one. She was nearly ten years old, and she had never felt very connected to her mother. Carl briefly wondered if he was doing something wrong, but felt that he was doing the best he could, and that him and Wilma just had incredibly different temperaments. They never bothered getting an official divorce. As far as they were concerned, they were, but in the eyes of Asia and the law, they were only separated. Maybe that’s why Asia didn’t worry too much about it. In her mind, they were technically still married. And it made her feel better, just a little bit, anyway.

Asia marries Mr. Burns, of course. Mr. Burns is twenty-six when the series starts, and she is fifteen. When she is twenty-six and he is thirty-seven, they meet again at the Blocks’ ten year high school reunion and they get married later on. Nate is an EMT and loves his job and talks to schools across the nation about drugs and he has a long-term girlfriend, Kayla, who he met at Alcoholics Anonymous, but she falls off the wagon and starts dragging him down, and they break up in front of all the Blocks. He does date Amy again briefly when he’s in his early twenties, but they don’t last very long. Amy eventually marries a semi-famous modern artist and they go traveling together. 

When I was inside of her, I felt God. I touched something. I felt the white lights burst behind my eyes. I felt something such pure bliss inside of myself. I never wanted it to end. But end it did. Tragically, horribly. And I lost myself. But did I find myself in her? Or did I find parts of myself when I was fucking her? I never loved her the way I loved Ashleigh. Never. I loved her the way you love the attention that cancer gets you. I loved her the way people pay attention to dead teens after they commit suicide. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t true, it wasn’t genuine. It was love brought on by a shock, by something jolted through you that you could not explain or even begin to imagine. It was something so impure and so filthy and so not worth having that it was scarcely love at all. I told her I loved her and I hate myself for it. Because I am the first one that Ashleigh has ever loved. I am the first one she has ever let in. And I cannot say the same. And while that’s all fine and good, I know that she does not love me any less for it, I feel it. I feel the unclean thing in me, I felt it when I took her purity. The feeling that I do not deserve it. The feeling that I am not as good as her, not as clean. Just filthy and sad and taking her away from herself. But I refuse to destroy her. I have seen too many people destroyed in the name of love. And I love her, I love her, I love her. I’ll never let her go. Because I love her. I love her. I love her. More than anything else. It is a feeling more than any I have ever known.

                I didn’t mean to hurt him. I really didn’t. But when he told me that he loved me, I couldn’t deny that it felt really good. It made me feel happy. It made me feel loved, and warm, and sweet. And like someone who knew what love was. Of course I didn’t. I’m sure he didn’t really know back then either. But we were there together and we were sleeping together and we were moving in unison and it was feeling so good and we were moving together and then he said “I love you” and even I am tricked by the light and the moment and the physical intimacy of bodies moving together so I can’t say that I didn’t feel love for him in that very moment. But even a moment later, it was gone. But still I stayed, and I kept saying it too, trying to trick myself into believing in something that was never real. At least on my end. I don’t think it was on his either. Because moving bodies does not equal love. He never told me the next morning as soon as he woke up. Isn’t that what love is about? He never told me the next morning. He told me in the act, in the deed, while doing what we were meant to do, but he never told me right after. Or in the morning. And I don’t know. It made me feel less bad about what happened later. 

Asia Renee Mellino was born a fucking badass. Her mother left her and her father when she decided she wanted to go back to living a simplistic life and being a hippie. Asia misses her sometimes, but she has mostly gotten over it. She and her father aren’t very close, but they do love each other. He’s away a lot and he is often baffled by his teenage daughter. But he tries his best to be supportive. Asia is a cold ass bitch and she doesn’t care about your agenda, she only cares about her own. She firmly believes that reading books is not the end all be all of smart people. She much prefers going out and living life than reading about other people doing just that. Sometimes people thinks she’s an attention whore, some people think she’s just a regular whore. Some people believe that she’s gonna be famous, some people believe that she’s never going to amount to anything and that high school is her prime. But you know what all of those people have in common? She doesn’t give a fuck about them or anything they have to say about her. Asia is a stone cold bitch and she rides her own agenda hard. Her hair is real, but sometimes in the winter she has to help it out. Her make up always looks fierce. She’s the girl that you dream about being. But she has her own shit to deal with too. She is terrified of commitment, she is terrified of being alone. She is terrified of being in a room full of people who don’t really care about her, but she has no idea what she would do if she ever found someone who actually did. She tells some of her secrets to Chris, but she never lets her guard down enough to truly love him. Besides, he’s loved Ashleigh from the beginning, anyway. Asia tells a lot of her secrets to Scott Hanson, but when he drops the L word, which she swore she’d never deal with again, she freaks out. Scott tries to convince her that she loves him too, but she is too scared to listen. Eventually he gets really angry and wonders why she freaks out so bad when he tells her that he’s in love with her, but she is fine with it when Chris said it. She even said it back. And finally, in a final confrontation, she admits to him and to herself that she felt okay saying it when she didn’t mean it, and the only reason that she freaked out so bad when he said that to her was that she believed that she truly loved him back. And that terrified her an immeasurable amount. She doesn’t know what to do with love. She has no use for it. She knows how to get what she wants, she knows how to do whatever she wants. She uses her body, her mind, her money. She has no use for feelings. No use for such heavy emotions that have every chance of destroying her and the image she has so meticulously created for herself.