Quiet Mountain Essays

Copyright ©, 2005

Self Portrait: On Youth
by
Kristina Marie Darling

The day Natalie fell in love with me, or at least when I realized she had, lots of things changed:  I
stopped following around my high school classmate Dave, begging for his phone number; I
started saying Natalie's name every chance that I got; and my parents lost track of how many
phone calls I made in a given week.  That is to say, the number of phone calls I made stopped
being zero.  Also, awakening to sisterhood, I had realized that when any girl cuts her leg shaving,
well, we all bleed red; my brother started calling me “the damn liberal” as though he was stating a
fact.

Natalie was the most beautiful human being I’d ever seen:

   At your birth the Fates sang of new slavery for girls
           And bestowed exalted kingdoms upon you.
                   -- Sulpicia

Yet, I didn’t let myself love her back.  Even now I wonder if I really did feel something for her,
although, ever since, I’ve dated only boys who are drug-addicted.  When my most recent ex
started with coke, I could understand it because, when Natalie had been around, my synapses had
misfired like bottle-rockets.  

This I began to understand, too, when thinking about love:

You burn me.
                   -- Sappho

I hadn't known that another person’s presence could physically hurt when things start to go
wrong; her opiates had crossed into my synaptic clefts.  Natalie started to realize that I would
never own up to being a Natalie-junkie.  She would flip her curly brown hair over her shoulder
and stare me down with colorless eyes.  It was worse than being on her “bad" list – to her, I wasn’t
even worth hurting.  She moved on, and began dating a pre-med guy at a nearby university.  

But I don’t think I ever quite moved on.  I often think about how I mishandled my youth like a
dropped dinner plate:

   Let childhood look ahead, old age backward:  was not this the meaning of                        
the double face of Janus?
                   -- Michele de Montaigne

Really, it wasn’t the meaning of the double face of Janus.  I’m only twenty, and I’ve started looking
back at how I never used childhood to learn from dropped dishes and failed tests.  Only books.  I
was the good daughter who never gave any surprises.  I’ll never know what I felt for Natalie.  
Maybe I responded to her because it was the first time I had ever received that special type of
attention that makes a person finally feel confident, if only for a measured amount of time.  
   
I’ve thought about how Natalie could have been as corrosive to my life as the crushed Ritalin she
snorted all the time is to the sinus passages.  If I’d gotten involved with Natalie, I’d have never
looked at love or homework the same:

To the extent that useful thoughts are fuller and more solid, they are also more absorbing and
burdensome.
   -- Michele de Montaigne

Which is quite an easy trap to fall into when you’re scheduled to take Calculus during your senior
year of high school.  I knew her world was dark as a lawyer’s heart; she had her own names for
the highs she achieved.  I don’t know why,  

Some say cavalry and others claim
           infantry or a fleet of long oars
           is the supreme sight on this black earth.
           I say it is

           the one you love.
                   -- Sappho

but maybe these names stick in my mind because that’s what she was to me – an amphetamine,
or something else that I could have gotten grounded for.
   
Getting grounded by my parents would have been easy.  My dad was a Christian fundamentalist
who held himself and those around him to strict moral standards.  Consequently, I’ve been an
existentialist since before I knew the proper word for what I believed.  I remember, about three
years after I’d watched Natalie walk to her red Jeep for the last time, Dad took me to church.  
Until that day, he and I had gone our separate philosophical ways.  I tried debating him,
debunking him, and everything else possible but I still got dragged (literally, dragged) to church.  
People were singing, dancing, and shouting in the name of the Lord, but I didn’t feel a thing.  No
life-changing epiphanies, no remorse; just plain old wish-I-had-a-Snickers hunger.  

The preacher, who’d been hollering so much he’d grown hoarse, let his wife take the pulpit.  She
told gays and addicts to “just stop sinning.”  She elaborated on how much easier their lives would
be if they only stopped “misbehaving.”  My face turned red and I walked out:

More than others I burn.
                   -- Sulpicia

I thought about my friends from gender studies classes, who called themselves “butch femmes”
and were some of the most well read women I’d ever met.  Although I continued dating male
junkies, I began to appreciate women like Natalie – for their daring haircuts, their fashion
magazine bonfires, and the complete independence of mind and soul they had achieved.  With
them, my life of activism began.  

After pretending to be sick in the church bathroom, I waited around for Dad to take me home.  I
didn’t talk the whole way back, but I remember my dad’s shock at hearing a woman preach.  He
spent the whole next day trying to find the bible verse that forbade it, but couldn’t.  
   
I sat alone in my room, thinking that the scriptures couldn’t be right – for Natalie's sake, although
I hadn’t seen her since she graduated from high school a year before me.   I stopped praying that
day for good.  Turning the pages of an Adrienne Rich book, my finger still bled the same shade of
red.

Contributor's Notes...

Ms. Darling is a student at Washington University in St. Louis.  Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in
several journals, including The Mid-America Poetry Review, Poetry Motel, Parting Gifts, Wicked Alice,  
Dream Fantasy International, and Prose Toad.

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