All I do is try, try try / Sophia Kreigel

All I do is try, try, try

WORDS Sophia Kriegel

There’s confetti on the floor of the concert. A mess someone will sweep up eventually, rolling their eyes at the way color melts under the soles of scuffed shoes. The girl on the stage is singing to a crowd of thousands and they’re all screaming her name. They’re all falling in love. She’s strumming a guitar. They’re throwing roses, now. They’re chanting. They storm the stage and reach for her hand. She can’t see them over all those lights. She can’t hear them over her heartbeat. She just keeps singing.

In another life, I must be someone worth keeping around. There’s a girl and she’s made of all the strands of hair I’ve left on the train or in the backseat of a car or in the shower drain. A rag doll with a chipped smile and blue eyes. In another life, I don’t ask you to stay. You go home and call me from your bedroom, lying on your stomach with your feet in the air, and I’m not afraid of you leaving. I’m not afraid of you not loving me.1 I don’t ask questions or cry or call my mother on the walk home just to make sure she’ll still answer. I’m not sad and I’m not alone and I never go on social media because it’s just not real, you know? I do yoga and I never lie to my parents and I stop using dating apps. I’m a celebrity, and a stranger with a camera asks me questions outside of a restaurant. He’s asking how it’s possible that I’ve made so many people fall in love with me. He’s asking how it feels to be so loved. In another life, I skip home only half-drunk. I wash my face before bed and never forget to wear sunscreen. Someone tells me they love me and they mean it. Someone tells me they love me and I believe them.

It’s not meant to be depressing. It’s just the reality of the situation. A streamer-covered floor the morning after the party. Not even a stranger staying to help pick up the pieces.

The boy doesn’t want to date because he needs to find himself. In the dark, I’m searching for his eyes and all I find is the curve of his spine, a shoulder. His limbs all wound up like twine. He’s searching for something, someone. He says I can sleep here if I want to. He kisses me on the forehead and then reminds me he can’t fall in love. He’s not made that way. When I leave, he says see you later but what he really means is goodbye. The next month, he posts a picture of a girl for Valentine’s Day and I’m wondering where he found himself. I’m wondering if he was ever lost.

When he calls a month later, she’s gone. He’s sad and I answer.2 In the dark, I feel myself growing smaller underneath him. He kisses me on the forehead and I don’t wince. I just fall asleep.

I keep finding strands of my hair stuck to the floor of my dorm room. I joke that I shed like a dog. I plucked a blonde curl from the bedsheets last night and another from between the cracks on Boylston. Another in my coffee. One day (soon I think?) I will wake up. Arms stuck to my sides. Suffocating underneath a long strand of platinum. Twisted around my neck or my hands or my torso. Coughing up hairballs. Calling my mother. Asking why, of all things, she cursed me with shiny, perfect hair if it was just going to rip itself out any chance it got? If it was just going to keep leaving? It’s everywhere.

I left a strand of hair on my first boyfriend’s pillowcase just so he would keep me around. At least until laundry day. I left another in the wilted leather of his passenger seat and another in the sink. Sometimes I wonder if his mother asks about me. If she remembers my name. I want to be the kind of person who’s hard to forget.3 Who keeps finding her way back. In the hallway of my childhood home, just a month before going away to college, I’m crying into my father’s chest. It’s 4 in the morning and my shadow is brushing my hair.4 Rubbing my back. In the dark, my father is asking “what’s the matter.” And the truth is, I keep telling him, the truth is, I’m so afraid of being forgotten. Of packing my things, the T-shirts and the toothbrush, walking out the door, and nobody remembering who I was. Nobody cared where I went. And I wouldn’t go without a fight. Kicking and screaming and clawing at the walls so they’d have no choice but to talk about me. I must have always been begging to be loved. The lonely feeling that permeates into the softest parts of myself. Into the backseat of the boy’s car, potent enough to make its way onto the family dining table. Convinced I couldn’t be kept around for lack of caring.

2. Tore my shirt to stop you bleedin’ But nothin’ ever stops you leavin’ (“when the party’s over,” Billie Eilish) 3. So I will wait for the next time you want me Like a dog with a bird at your door (“Moon Song,” Phoebe Bridgers) 4. I do my best to meet her demands, play at romance, we slow dance In the living room, but all that a stranger would see Is one girl swaying alone, stroking her cheek (“Liability,” Lorde)

Do we all feel this hopeless? Me, her, and my shadow? Are we all reaching towards something, someone, like fragile, tired children grabbing at something bigger, begging to be held.

When he laughs and tells me he couldn’t forget me even if he tried. When he tells me he loves me enough to not let mere absence make the mind dissolve my memory. I cry some more. My shadow gives us some time alone, sneaks off into the corner and calls her grandma just to tell her that she loves her. Just to make sure she feels loved.

I’m making everyone at the party laugh. Slapping their knees and screaming my name. Asking me to dance, asking me to fix their hair. Asking me to take a shot of their alcohol. They love me when I’m drunk and laughing, a sad clown who’s got a great smile. I close my eyes to dance and when I open them again, everyone’s gone.

It’s a solo walk back down Boylston, after all the lovers have stumbled home. My friends, warm with their own partners. And me clutching my coat. Wrapping my arms around my own torso. I’m not a jealous person. I keep telling myself that.

My headphones are playing a song I know every word to. A mantra, an affirmation. Anything to feel known and seen and understood even if only by some singer in a different state. A different tax bracket. But her words remind me that even the rich and famous have a bathroom, a floor to sink into. And tears all look the same when they hit the cold tile. Do we all feel this hopeless? Me, her, and my shadow? Are we all reaching towards something, someone, like fragile, tired children grabbing at something bigger, begging to be held. She’s singing: The truth is I am a toy that people enjoy, ‘Til all of the tricks don’t work anymore, And then they are bored of me. She’s crying: If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst. That could happen to a girl who’s already hurt?. I’m already hurt. She’s begging: Don’t you think I loved you too much to be used and discarded? Don’t you think I loved you too much to think I deserve nothing? And I’m singing with her. The stage goes black and all the people go home. The janitor sweeps up the streamers, collects the cardboard signs. We hold each other. We just stand there and hold each other.