Category: Words

There was a tragic story out of Florida recently involving a police officer and some teenage lovers who were running away from home to be together. All three ended up dead when the boy shot the officer, and then his girlfriend and himself. The letters the two had written each other are touching, and sad and reminded me how incredibly intense life and love are when you’re that age. And how easy it is for kids in love to do something horrifying when they feel like someone is trying to come between them.

Things are so much harder emotionally at that age. Before you learn to dull things down so they are more bearable. Before you learn that things get better, that things change. Before you learn to put up a little bit of shielding between your heart and the world. Before you learn that things will be OK.

You may disagree with me about this, but I think that teenagers can fall in love. I don’t know if it’s common, but I have no doubt at all that it is possible. I don’t think it’s “Puppy Love” or a crush, or “just hormones.” It’s real, and it’s overwhelming.

When very young people do fall in love, it is particularly intense and hard to get over for a lot of reasons. How many people do you know who have never forgotten their first love? There is a lot of emotion that is hard to let go of. It’s a combustible time. Combustion is memorable. It leaves a mark. In the case of these two and the officer they killed, the combustion was deadly.

Did it have to be?

Part of the tragedy here relates to how easily a kid was able to get his hands on a gun and use it. Someone else can have that discussion.

When you’re a teenager, you’re a hormonal and emotional hurricane in a body that is changing every minute. Everything is new. Everything is big. When you fall in love it seems like that is all there is. It feels like you will die if you lose it. You hope you do die. You just don’t have the kind of shielding to protect yourself from the flood of feelings that an adult does. That makes an already intense feeling even more so. Much more so. Add in how hormonally souped up you are, and newly discovered sexual feelings directed at someone you just can’t keep your hands off of and you have something that will be hard to recover from if it ends. Which it almost always does. Usually not in a tragedy.

So these two kids wanted nothing but to be together, and their families wanted them to be apart. For reasons that seem totally rational to an adult, but insane to a teenager.

To them, it must have felt like the whole world was against them. It kind of is. The world isn’t kind to kids in love. They aren’t kind to the world, either.

Three people are dead because no one could figure out what to do about a couple of kids who loved each other. It isn’t a new story.

Maybe someday we’ll figure out what to do.

Note: this started life as a bit of an ode to how wonderful and overwhelming first love is. Then I read this story, and it wasn’t anymore. When I compare my own experience with this, there’s obviously a very different outcome…but I found myself really identifying with the poor dead girl who just wanted to be happy writing lists of things that were going to be wonderful in their life together.

I didn’t mean to hurt you
I’m just a jealous guy
–J.Lennon

John Lennon was probably pretty hard to be in love with of you go by song lyrics. He wrote several songs about being kind of an overly possessive creep. Ever hear “the End?” That’s the one in which he says he’s rather see her dead than with another man.

John was not the nice Beatle.

The implication in this one is that he’s sorry he keeps hurting her, but he can’t help it. It’s his character.

What do you do if who you are hurts the person you love?

Is it like the folk tale of the scorpion begging for a ride across the river? The scorpion stings the zebra on the way across, so they both die. It was inevitable. That’s what scorpions do!

How much you hurt someone doesn’t have all that much to do with intent, does it?

The other night I was up having one of my periodic nocturnal crying jags.
I tried to stay in bed and go back to sleep but eventually got up and wrote for a few hours. About the crying jag and the not sleeping. Maybe you read about it.

After a few hours, I went back to bed. Just as I was falling asleep, I had a thought. It was cold in the house, and warm under the covers, so I didn’t particularly welcome the thought. It was 0400. I wanted to sleep, not think. I tried to cajole the thought into going away by telling it I’d remember to write it down when I woke up. The thought wasn’t going to fall for my pathetic tricks, so I grabbed the nearest electronic device and wrote it down so it would shut up and leave me alone.

My technophiliac version of a scrawled note.

It said:
Ride it out=
Write it out

Since I wrote it on a keyboard, I could even read what it said the next day. The miracle of technology saves me from my own bad handwriting once again.

I had just ridden out a bad spell by writing it out. It is what I do. Either ride things out or write them out. Or both.

Some people can talk it out. I can’t do that. I am almost entirely literate and essentially non-verbal. Can you use literate like that? Verbally non-expressive, but able to write my feelings ? There must be a better word for it than that. I wonder what it is? I wonder what it is. Great. I am officially not only non-verbal but only marginally better equipped to express myself in writing.

Regardless of what the word for expressing thoughts and feelings better in writing is, what I do if I am having a feeling or thought that is impacting me in some way is write about it. Writing about it helps me think about it more clearly. It helps me ride it out.

If I just think about something, I am much more liable to fixate on it and get into a brain spin. Writing seems to put a bit of structure around it, whatever “it” is, and help me work it out instead of just inventing alternative scenarios until I can’t think of anything else.

Writing helps me pinpoint what it is that is bothering me, but forces me to be relatively concise about it. I may not stop thinking about it completely after writing about something, but there’s a good chance that I’ll know myself and my feelings better.

It might bring out unwelcome emotions in the short term while I’m writing, but long term it keeps me calmer. That is a huge help in letting go of what needs letting go, or figuring out what I want to do about something where a more concrete decision is in order.

Where it’s most helpful, though, is with the kind of things where there is no right or wrong answer. Where it’s not a question of just making a decision but where there’s a situation I’m just struggling with mentally. When really, I just need to get my shit together and hang on.

I am very good at hanging on, but I wouldn’t vouch for my level of sanity.

If I can write it out, then there’s a very good chance I can ride out just about anything without going completely nuts.

I’m still partially nuts. Nothing can fix that.