writing

my bleed american summer

~ GennaClaire ~ Leave a comment

Certain songs take me back to places I don’t necessarily care to return. Dusty corners of memory I’ve boarded away on purpose. Shadows I’d like to pretend aren’t lurking inside my mind. Wounds that never quite healed.

It was Jimmy Eat World that wove its way into the soundtrack of my summer after graduating high school. When Bleed American washed over me like the Georgia heat. When I was stuck between a high school dreamer and a lost college soul.

I was serving coffee in the morning and ice cream at night in the middle of suburbia with A Praise Chorus and Sweetness on repeat every second in between. Working two jobs just to occupy my mind. So it wouldn’t slip up and find its way back to you.

Now when I hear any of those eleven tracks, I can’t help but go back to that endless summer. I remember that poor, sweet 18-year-old girl.

How she felt like she was finally going to move forward, but really she was just spinning in circles around you.

When I couldn’t sleep, I’d put earphones in so those words could keep me company in the darkness. If you still care at all, don’t go tell me now. If you love me at all, don’t call.

I’d let Your House and Cautioners and Hear You Me lull me into my dreams.

I played that CD as I packed up my things at the end of August. As I drove my little cherry red Mustang to Athens for the first time. Windows down. Volume up. As I made my great escape.

I said my goodbyes. This is my sundown. I’m gonna be so much more than this.

I never managed to escape you that summer. And when I hear these songs today, I sometimes wonder if I ever did.

the bravest girl i ever knew

~ GennaClaire ~ Leave a comment

I still dream about you. Three and a half years later and you relentlessly haunt my sleep.

I used to wake up in agony from those dreams. Feeling pathetic and defeated and lost. But no longer.

I’ve finally accepted the fact that you will never leave me. Those six years we spent together – holding hands and rubbing noses and discovering each other and ourselves – those six years shaped who I am. Those six years altered who I’ve become.

It’s because I let you so deep inside me that I am forever changed by you. My soul. My spirit. The way I think. The way I feel. The way I love.

My dreams of you do not mean I long for you still. They mean I loved you with all I had. They mean I gave you every drop of me. They mean I held nothing back.

Sixty-three and a half years from now, should I still wake up with thoughts of you, I’ll be proud. Proud of how honestly I loved. How eagerly. How fearlessly.

That girl who loved you for six years was the bravest girl I ever knew.

faith > fried chicken

~ GennaClaire ~ 1 Comment

I have a tattoo on my ribcage. On the left side to be nearer to my heart. It says “Here is love vast as the ocean.”

The opening line from a hymn. A hymn about love.

Those seven words sum up all that I believe. Love is the core of it all. Even the good book itself says love is greater that hope or faith. And the stories written of our King are not of condemnation and judgment. They are of breaking bread with sinners and healing the lame and feeding the hungry and giving sight to the blind and casting out no one. And love. And love. And love.

Those red letters, all those precious words He spoke, they tell us to love.

I will not argue with you about Chick-Fil-A’s right to freedom of speech. I will not debate gay marriage. I will not discuss who should make up a family unit.

The reality is, I’m too busy loving all of God’s children. I do not have time to build walls around them. To isolate myself from them. To suggest they do not deserve what I have done nothing to earn.

Nor would I even want to.

Here is love vast as the ocean. Written on my ribcage. Written on my heart.

a girl broke my heart

~ GennaClaire ~ Leave a comment

It was a girl named Katie who first broke my heart.

She wasn’t the one I loved, I guess. Not in the diamond rings and white dresses and ‘till death do us part’ kind of way.

I loved her the way any unassuming 16-year-old loves a friend. With commitment and endlessness and simplicity, I suppose. I loved her in a ‘I hope you’ll hold my bouquet and adjust my train one day’ kind of way.

We celebrated the middle of March each year by buying each other a gift. We laughed at jokes that no one else found funny. We slept on each other’s floors on the weekends. Stayed up until all hours of the morning telling secrets and believing the world was ours.

And I told her things I thought only she could understand – the way I felt about the boy I was seeing. That I adored him. That he was consuming me. That I thought he was the one. That I finally felt ready to have sex with him. That I completely lost myself in the euphoria of him.

I told her those things. All those things. Every last moment. Every detail.

Those were the things I thought only she would understand.

She did understand.

Only later did I realize just how well.

I went away for school and left the two of them together. The boy I loved more than anything and the girl I trusted with everything.

And they found each other.

And they forgot about me.

Time came and did the best it could to heal, but I still cannot think of the gruesome details without wanting to buckle over and vomit.

The two of them fucking in the back of his small green pick-up. Pulled over in Hurt Road Park, judged by only little league fields and empty concession stands. How many times did he pull away there with me as only the faintest reality suffocated in the back of the his head? Or hers?

For a while I was so sure he broke my heart. I thought it was he who shredded me up inside.

But years later, I’ve long forgotten him. Him and his selfishness and his perfection. His opinions and his qualifications. I never quite got a hold of him. He was always just out of reach

But I remember her. That girl, the one whose breasts he groped and kissed – that was my best friend. The brown eyes he stared into once told me I could trust them with all my secrets. The dark curls he wrapped his fingers around, I pinned them in an up-do for her prom. I pulled them out of her face for her own father’s funeral.

What a fool I was to fall for her.

Sure, it hurt that he would do that to me, but boys break hearts. I knew every moment of that relationship that he was going crush me.

But your friends, they’re supposed to be the ones who pick the shattered pieces of you off the ground. Not the ones holding the sledgehammer.

It was my best friend Katie who pulled the trigger and walked away. It was my best friend Katie who dug the knife in my back then twisted it around. It was my best friend Katie who first broke my heart.

the letter

~ GennaClaire ~ Leave a comment

Chloe: What did it say?
Me: That he hasn’t stopped thinking about that day.
Chloe: Who even sends letters anymore? That’s so World War II.
Me: That he closes his eyes and it’s like he can almost get back to it. That he goes home each day and locks himself in his room. Draws in the curtains, turns off the lights. Puts “Hear You Me” on repeat on his iPod. Lays down and just dwells in the memory of it.
Chloe: He sent a letter just to tell you that?
Me: He pulls the covers around his chin and one by one, he considers every detail. The torn booth at Waffle House. A waitress with a spider tattoo behind her ear. The smell of burnt coffee and cigarettes and butter and syrup. The long drive. My feet hanging out the passenger seat window. Mustard ballet flats and Jimmy Eat World. Running out of gas around three in the morning. Sprinting hand in hand toward the nearest exit, laughing the whole way. The rain. The rain. The rain. The sting of the tall grass on our ankles. The heat rising off the wet asphalt. A red gas can and a six-pack. The long walk back to the truck. The sunrise over the ocean. The stillness of both of us in the sand. Side by side. Trying to figure out some way, any way, to keep the sun from rising. To keep the night from ending. To stay in that moment forever.
Chloe: I feel like he could have just called.
Me: He said he’s scarred from it. Marred by the flawlessness of it all. He’s terrified nothing will ever compare. That will always be the best there ever was. He doesn’t know how to move past it. He’s not sure he really wants to.
Chloe: Are you going to write back?
Me: Yeah, I guess I will.
Chloe: What are you going to say?
Me: I’ll ask which scares him more, ruining the most perfect thing that has ever happened to him or never knowing if something that great could be even better.
Chloe: That’s it?
Me: Yeah, that’s it.
Chloe: You should probably just send a text.