Sweet Potato Haircut

There I saw him: tumbling off his skateboard in the distance, a cardboard box full of things spilling across the sidewalk, him bending gracefully to re-settle his items in his box, putting the box back in his hands, and continuing to skateboard in my direction, strong pale arms shining out from a tank top in the warm afternoon sun. I, standing astride my bicycle, walked a few steps from the center of the sidewalk to let him pass, watching indiscreetly as he cautiously rolled over the cracks of the curb, with the speed of what I might adoringly call a beginner. As he and his box wobbled slowly on their way, the story in my mind was taking its lovely shape: A boy, strong and slender and sincere, learning to ride his skateboard even in the face of failure, of falling, of dropping his shit across the street, and he rolls slowly on, unabashedly earnest in his efforts. My heart swelled as I pedaled up the street. 

The next time I saw him, it was at the Resident Assistant meeting the next morning, in which we all introduced ourselves with benign facts about our lives and I listened as the strangers throughout the room talked about their summers of driving forklifts and manning the exit gate for Millenium Force at the Cedar Point amusement park, binging TV shows and going to Florida during red tide. When he finally spoke, my pale-armed skater, it took several words for me to realize that his musical voice was accented- British, perhaps, a lilting cadence of letters and round-sounding words filling the room. My lips parted in small shock at the impeccability of his creation, the earnestly amateur skateboarder from England gracing my ears and eyes this very moment. The story of my mind blossomed further: He has come to study abroad here (for some unfathomable reason), far from his sweet-speaking mum and dad, his little sister and his old dog, his friends from secondary school. He misses them all greatly, and finds himself somewhat of a loner in this rural, Michigan town, at a school where the people are nice but not nearly as soulful or compelling as the people of London who walk the pulsing streets in their vibrant clothing, music spilling from every open window and people sitting outside cafes with their notebooks and their dark sunglasses. No, the people here were nice, for the most part, but generally unremarkable- sheep in the herd, people trying to look and act like other people to feel like they belong.

When I introduced myself to the room, my voice soft and my hair shorn and my cicada wings dangling from my earlobes, telling the group that my family and I had been watching the show Twin Peaks (to which the room stared blankly), that I worked as a park ranger all summer, I imagined him watching me with serious eyes, recognizing in me the strangeness of his friends from home, the black sheep in the crowd. I imagined him remembering me from my bike as he rolled slowly by, my small blue backpack and my polka dotted helmet on my head, I imagined the pieces of attraction falling into place, I imagined a tether forming between us, made of curiosity and kinship, a tether I could almost feel piercing my solar plexus, my center of me. 

In the Resident Assistant group chat, someone messaged that they were trying to get people to play sand volleyball tonight in the quad around, say, 8pm? So in efforts of meeting my fellow RA’s and potentially finding friends I decided to go, pushing against the swelling anxiety inside me warning me that I don’t know anyone there, I’m not very good at organized sports, I feel tired and wary of meeting new people, I didn’t wear a good outfit for this, I didn’t eat dinner yet, that – hushing myself, I grabbed my small blue bag and walked toward the quad, finding some girls along the way to walk with, showing up to an empty sand volleyball pit with two big boys sitting in the grass, eventually getting a game of 3 on 3 going in which I tried and failed to serve the ball, pass the ball, get the ball over the net, and make conversation. My insides were still, stunned at the discomfort of this situation I had chosen for myself, paralyzingly unsure of how to best proceed so instead doing nothing. With my insides immobile, my outside was shy, embarrassed at sucking so hard at sand volleyball, nice but not much else. My mind raged with concern over how everyone else must be seeing me, meek and bland and unathletic, admonishing me for my inability to overcome this discomfort and be more of my vibrant self. In the midst of my primordial chaos, he arrived, the slow skateboarder rolling up through the sunset street. The story of my mind began then to crash overwhelmingly with the realities of the present, the fragile fantasies of my articulate heart shattering in my own body, filling me with something like disgust, something like shame, the unsettling reality that I’d spent such adoring energy illusioning this tangible person’s reality, which was not reality at all but the creations of my own, obsessive mind. I learned while ducking from the ball and standing as close to the net as I could that this boy was a volleyball player, come here from New Zealand to play for the school, that he was planning on going to the gym after this, that he laughs at the bad jokes of the other douchebag boys strutting their stuff across the sand, that we didn’t say more than 6 words to each other and maybe never would, that the stories of my mind are compelling and heartbreakingly fictional, that it was now wholly unlikely that I would ever travel to England with this once alluring stranger to meet his mum and his old dog, to rear his dark haired children, to talk about the time he dropped his box on the sidewalk and I fell in love.