The Not so Tragic Love Life of Kate Awkward: Part 1

[Oop! It's back. I previously published this in February, but I deleted it because I was ashamed. However, I liked it too much to delete it permanently. That, and I'm an asshole. Enjoy.]

All of the following is basically true. The names have been replaced to protect the dignity of all those involved except Kate, she gets to wallow in her shame.

Let's begin.

There was a girl. Her name was Kate.

Kate had no personal identity because she was lame. 

Falling into the alternative crowd in high school, she developed the desire to be emo. Sadly, she was only a poser. 

She looked like this:

She was very serious about her poserdom.

[Yes, this is an actual photo of me from that period of my life.] 

She was so serious that she took MySpace pictures of herself nearly every day. 

She updated her Facebook status to something tragically sad, like "What if I would go to sleep for days, would you count the hours?" and "I hate my life." 

Or to something unfortunate that happened, like, "I can't believe I have to go to stupid school" and "Why does this keep happening to me?" (The identity of 'this' remains a mystery, but it can be assumed that it had something to do with missing breakfast.) [Yes, these are actual statuses that I posted.]

Clearly, she was a catch just waiting to be had. 

[Note the sarcasm.]

She stalk-... pursued any male who accidentally happened to glance her way, misguided and fueled by bad teen fiction novels that told of instantaneous, "true" love.

She had no luck, to the surprise of no one. Not even her.

Then, this silly non-emo emo kid did something she swore never to do. 

She went to College. 

She proceeded to meet the craziest psychopath to ever walk the earth wearing the clothes of a human being and immediately befriended her.

This friendship swiftly became a doctor-patient-quite-possibly-lesbian situation. 

The non-emo, emo girl willingly played the doctor of the pair, while the psychopath in sheep's clothing was the murder victim in the ER.

This relationship consumed her.

While she denied her suffering for the most part, she used the accepted suffering to fuel her emo-ness. 

During their time together, the psychopath searched for a mate in a frothy, desperate frenzy, excreting angst all over Dr. Emo when her labors were fruitless. Dr. Emo absorbed it and gave the psychopath a dose of hope in each instance.

While trying to balance school, sleep, and taking psycho to the ER every Sunday for five weeks straight, Dr. Emo was trying to find love as well.

Little did she know she was getting in way over her head.

Failure el Numero Uno: Goldfish

Emo Girl met Goldfish while shopping in her favorite poser store, Hot Topic. He was a worker there and one that had caught her eye due to his blood red hair.

His looks and IQ could be likened to this:

Emo Girl was smitten instantly.

Blinded by teenage passion and desperation, she looked around his minor flaws and completely denied the major ones.

Poor Emo-poser-girl was far too shy to talk to him herself and ask his name, so rather than just suck up her fear and talk to him, she avoided it entirely and devised an unnecessarily convoluted plan. 

First, she needed a name. Then her plan could commence without hindrance. 

She knew the receipt would have the name of the cashier on it, since it was clearly out of her capacity to just read his name tag.

So, as time passed, she, in her loitering, over stylized glory, kept revisiting the store, buying pin-buttons, wrist bands, and anything under 5 dollars, hoping to be rung up by her Knight with Shining Nail Polish.

One day, her dreams were realized. 

Pretending to be entirely neutral, but not uninterested, she gave him the "glittering, innocent" smile while she waited [the one she had been practicing beforehand in the mirror at home].  

It looked something like this:

She hoped that in that moment she she had seduced his heart right out of his chest and was just acting completely unchanged by her display of well-practiced enticement.

Her unneeded emo accessories purchased, Emo-Girl left with the receipt, his name firmly printed on it.

At first, she quelled her desire to stalk investigate. She stored the receipt in her wallet for safe keeping.

Then she promptly forgot about it, since the psychopath was having a life threatening situation (meaning she was experiencing slight trauma and was having minor boy troubles) and in need of Dr. Emo's medicinal, and seemingly endless font of encouragement and support. 

Later, after the psychopath had been sated, she found the receipt again and decided to do a little research.

She geared up her computer and with her l33t stalking powers entered his name into the Facebook search bar. 

After only a couple pages of Goldfish with multitudinous last names, she found her Goldfish, identified by his blood red hair. 

She was impressed by her own creepiness and was naturally hesitant to add him. But the distance of the internet and the desire of love compelled her to press the fateful button. 

Hours passed and soon the anxiously awaited notification appeared, telling her that he had added her as a friend.

She felt jubilant, but it was rapidly replaced by terror. What would she do now? 

Talking to him was absolutely preposterous. What would she say when he asked her how she knew him? 

"Oh, I was stalking you..." was not the smoothest path to take. Neither was "I visited your store every weekend for three weeks straight and conveniently 'found' you over Facebook."

So, time passed and, after a long day of emotional harassment from her favorite psychopath, Emo Girl plucked up the courage to FB Chat with him.

The conversation proceeded like a partially oiled machine, awkward, jerky, and spastic. Though, for Emo-Girl this was a step forward. In fact, he seemed amused by her. 

Though, the unavoidable question of who she was did arise.

She hastily gave a partial truth, saying that she knew him from his work, lying that they talked one afternoon while she was shopping. 

He took that story without question. (How this didn't alert her to his lack of functioning neurons will never be resolved.)

This match made in a highly materialistic Alternative store was progressing well.

Instant Message moved to text message (after Goldfish shared his number and Desperation Emo begged her parents to allow her text messaging) and then text messaging to phone calls. 

Their conversations would revolve like fish in a bowl on three subjects, Cars, iPods, and Music, since those were the only three things that Goldfish had the proficiency to address.

Soon, the anticipated day that they would meet finally arrived. Poser-Emo felt like this could be the moment they would confess their undying love for one another.

However, there was a hitch. 

Emo-Face was too afraid to go alone, so she asked the psychopath to go with her.  

As could be assumed, there was no avowal of souls during this meeting. The feelings in Emo Girl's self-blackened heart could be described as thus:

But she felt that it was more like this:

[Image copyrighted to ArtHawk]

Such tragedy.

The next time she saw her beloved Goldfish was when he attended her performance of Macbeth. 

She was playing the romantic part of Witch # 2. Dressed in lingerie with a bloody doll, Emo-Actress captured the heart of her Goldfish as she killed a mother and her son on stage. 

After her disturbing performance, they met up, loitered awkwardly outside the theater while struggling through small talk, then decided to go on a deeply romantic walk to the bluff near the murky, smelly Missouri river. 

Sitting down on the bench nearest the overlook, Emo-Actress' source of knowledge failed her. 

According to her multitudinous adolescent-fiction-romance books, the Bluff was a place where budding lovers discovered each other by the light of the moon. 

This hypothesis could not be tested due to the Abbey full of monks only 500 feet behind her, all of whom had the ability to hear her hair growing without having to open their windows. 

But more so than that, Emo girl was too distracted because Goldfish had his arm around her shoulder and that was the farthest she had gone with any man in her whole lifetime.

She was unsure how to respond. 

In her mind, there were three options:

1.) Scoot closer.

2.) Follow the example of a statue and do absolutely nothing. Not even breathe.

3.) Run. 

4.) Make babies.

That was four. Emo-girl can't quantify either. 

Following her pathetically under-developed womanly instincts, she chose the first.

Using the ambient temperature as an excuse, which was probably around 75 degrees Fahrenheit, she gracelessly jammed herself next to him until she was nestled under his shoulder. 

When he didn't appear fazed by her unwieldy display, she decided it might be safe to lean her head on his shoulder. 

Emo-Girl laid her head on him in such a way that she was still partially holding her head up, but was relying on his shoulder to support her. She did this because she felt resting her head too heavily without tact would signify weakness or harlotry and setting it too lightly would make her seem standoffish and stiff.

As could be expected, this position was comfortable for a grand span of 4 seconds. 

Her neck tightened and her neglected muscles cried, but she didn't want to pull away. She was sure that he would feel utterly rejected since she was positive her most precious, awkward affection was the only thing keeping him from despair.

So, rather than do the logical thing, she stayed in that painful position until her whole body began to shake. 

Goldfish exercised the 4 partially functioning cells of his brain and pulled her closer so as to share body heat, since he still thought that she was cold- a ruse that a brain dead monkey could have seen through. 

As if someone had turned on a hormone faucet in her body, Emo-Girl felt the historic and thrilling moment of their first passionate kiss rising up inside her.

His lips were only inches away. 

As if he felt her hormone fountain spilling onto him, he turned his head toward hers and...

Emo-Girl balked. She didn't know how to kiss someone.

Short circuited by this sudden wash of confusion, she panicked and did the first thing she could think of to avoid a prodigious social catastrophe that would wipe out her dignity and self-esteem in the same blow:

She pressed her cheek against his instead.

Even though the initial crisis was averted, the desire to passionately exchange saliva still stewed in the back of her mind, dancing on her other thoughts like an Irish Stepper on PCP. 

Trying a second time, she slowly readjusted her head until their lips were nearly touching, since, much like asking his name, asking to kiss him was completely beyond her capacity. 

Both sensing each other's desires, they turned their heads into one another's like two rolling pins crushing a plate of dough and they shared their first kiss.

Emo Girl was too dazed by the shock of being kissed to realize that it was the most disappointing moment in her 18 years of life. 

It was wet, slobbery and unsavory, but because it was her first kiss and she was convinced she had found the man of her dreams, she denied it and pretended it was the most amazing thing since Ziplock bags filled with cornstarch and water.

After concluding their messy face stamping, they paused to assess the situation between them, unsure of how to proceed.

Goldfish: So, I guess we're dating now.

Kate: I guess we must be. I don't know.

Goldfish: I mean, we did just kiss and everything...

Kate: Yeah, I think we're dating now.

And so it was sealed. This couple was now connected by the bond of an awkward kiss with the witness of 30+ monks.

Nothing could go wrong. 

Goldfish left for home hours later since he had to get back before his morning shift the next day. (If it wasn't mentioned before, Goldfish was not in school nor did he have the desire to go back.)

Five days later, after thinking on her feelings for Goldfish and being mentally ransacked by a jealous psychopath who still had no mate, Emo-Girl had come to the conclusion that Goldfish was not up to her standards. 

Surprise.

She called him on a Friday, before her final performance of Macbeth. She was in hysterics even before she picked up the phone, since she had never broken up with someone before.

Her feelings were synonymous to this:

Clearly her woes were too great to bear.

Tucked away in a bathroom at the public eatery on campus, she dialed the number of her doom and raised the instrument of death to her ear. 

As it rang, despair edged into her mind. She felt like she what she was about to do was the equivalent to feeding a child to a pack of rabid marmosets. 

But luckily she had her trusty psychopath and her future roommate, Gwin, there to give her support as she called. 

The conversation followed similarly to this:

Goldfish: Hello?

Kate: Goldfish,I'msorrybutwe'renotworkingoutandI'msorryand-IwishIdidn'thavetodothisandI'msosososorryPleaseforgivemeInevermeanttohurtyou-IjustthoughtthatIknewwhatIwantedandI'msososorry! -hysterical babbling-

Goldfish: Wha-... what? No. Please don't. 

Kate: I'm sorry. This just isn't working. -more hysteria-

Goldfish: -getting choked up- But, you're the only one who keeps me from smoking... I need you.

Kate: I expect you to not do that for your own sake. I'm so sorry, but I have to go.

Goldfish: But... Okay.

She snapped the bearer of misfortune shut and burst into anime-class tears, throwing herself on the necks of her friend Gwin and her psychopath, losing the function of her legs for a couple moments. 

She was able to compose herself enough to kill the mother and son one last time. 

After the trauma had subsided enough that she could see normally, Emo-Girl felt better about her life and her outlook.

Little did she know, her luck with men would not improve.

And thus concludes the first portion of The Not So Tragic Love Life of Kate Awkward.

Peace off.