She sits along the Seinne in Paris crying to her mother. She tells her mother how much it hurts and her mother says “I know, I have been there.”
-
The amount of heartbreak she has seen in twenty three years is a lot. The number of boyfriends and relationships, the amount of times she thought “he could be the one.” The more she thinks of this, the more she is reminded that every time her heart has been broken, she has survived. She can't remember who it was that told her this piece of advice but it was one she passed on to many friends who came to her with relationship troubles. “Every time you thought you weren’t going to make it, every time you cried your eyes out, and thought you would never love again, well look at you now, surviving and shit.” ‘Surviving and shit,’ what a combination of words she thinks to herself. The mundanity of waking up, brushing your teeth, getting dressed, if you had class going to it, and if you didn’t figuring out what to do instead.
Bella does not consider herself depressed. Nor does she consider herself to have ADHD. For some strange reason, the only thing she “considers” herself to have is anxiety. She has never been clinically tested, and she doesn’t really know the first step to take in going that direction. In a way she is fearful of the results. She is sure the “results” would come back listing that she has every mind crippling thing out there. She struggles with the argument inside of her head that everyone has a little bit of something. She dare not say this out loud for society might call her insensitive or somehow find offense in her intention of being understanding. She doesn’t mean to invalidate what anyone else feels or thinks, just more to say that she thinks everyone has a little bit of everything. Bella thinks that if you were to analyze every movement someone did from the moment they woke up to the time they went to sleep, you would find they itched themselves three times in a row, or maybe got nervous about going to the movies alone, cried for reasons they can’t put into words, had a panic about the bills they need to pay at the end of the month, or threw a “fuck you” at the bus driver that cut into their bike lane. Bella’s point is that at one second or the other, at five o’clock or at six, someone somewhere is bound to have a moment of OCD, anxiety, depression, and anger. Bella thinks to herself that if the world stopped trying to label every feeling we have, then maybe we wouldn’t feel those things so often. Maybe we would accept ourselves for the complex humans that we are. Made of one hundred trillion synaptic connections, of course our brains are going to suffer from some of these things we so un-reluctantly label ourselves with.
Bella pushes the thoughts of what the world would be like without labels to the side, and continues to cry to her mother about a boy she met ten days ago and how she thought he was the one. Bella does this often. She will meet someone, fall in love (or so she thinks) very quickly (time is relative), and when they leave because her attachment has grown too strong in too little of time, her world collapses once again. Surviving and shit might be a cycle Bella has placed herself into like a little hamster and now that the ball is rolling, she’s afraid to jump out.
“But mom I really did think this one was it.”
“I know sweetie, but imagine how much you loved this one for only ten days, and now imagine all the love you can give to the person who ends up staying!” The strained cheer in her voice as Lauretta tries to console her daughter from 8,900 kilometers away.
Lauretta has not had what some may consider an “easy” life. But she believes that almost all measurements are relative. Lauretta’s mother passed away just after she was born and her father never told her from what. She thought it was his way of protecting her from knowing something really bad, but in a way, consistently creating scenarios as to how your mother died wasn’t exactly a better alternative. Her father sent her off to live with her grandparents in Tennessee when she was eight, he couldn’t afford the lifestyle he wanted and a growing girl.
Lauretta loved Clay County. She lived on R J Bell Road and could walk through the woods behind her house and reach Dale Hollow Lake in just under seven minutes. On Tuesday’s at noon, her best friend who lived on Bristow Road, would meet Lauretta on her driveway, buy ice cream from the truck, and the two would disappear to the lake only to return when they saw the faint glow of the street lamps through the branches of the trees.
Lauretta spent almost all of her time in these woods, until she was teenager who had better things to do than swim in lakes and make forts. She visited the woods just about the same amount of time only now it was where the high schoolers went to smoke and make out. All of them had a secret bell that they would ring if they saw someone’s angry parent making their way through the bushes. A bell that never went off for Lauretta, her grandparents were simply to old to make their way into the woods. A bell she would later name her daughter after, in honor of the freedom she was allowed that led her to the best mistake she ever made.
She was married by the time she was sixteen. A curse on the rush of time she thinks she has handed down as an example to Bella. She fell head over heels with Mauricio from Milan, got pregnant, and they decided that their love was too strong to do anything other than keep who is now Bella. “Mauricio from Milan” was what Lauretta's closest girlfriends from high school would chant down the hallway at her when they first found out about her crush on him. It’s the nickname they gave him when they saw his golden locks bouncing on top of the other curls, his tanned skin glistening like an angel, his green eyes casting love spells on every teenage girl at Clay County High. Surprisingly, she was able to keep her cool around him, she had to. The only way to get a bad boy’s attention is to beat him at his own game. But when she knew no one could see, she would write
M-a-u-r-i-c-i-o over and over again, M-a-u-r-i-c-i-o M-a-u-r-i-c-i-o M-a-u-r-i-c-i-o M-a-u-r-i-c-i-o M-a-u-r-i-c-i-o increasing in size until her whole journal page was filled up with those seven letters.
He was an exchange student who came to study for two years. The Italian system wasn’t mandatory after age sixteen and Mauricio’s family thought it would do him some good to commit to something long term.
“Non mi piace l'America. Non sto andando,” he said to his father.
Only to received a smack across his left cheek in reply,“Stai andando.”
Mauricio did not fit in quickly in Tennessee. Because it was nothing like Milan, it was exactly what his father was looking for. He noticed the clothes were completely different in Clay County than he’d seen anywhere in Europe before. Some of the teachers wore rain boots to school even though it rarely rained. His teacher told him the population was only seven thousand people. Two million, two hundred thousand less people than back home. But one thing that this small town was not lacking in was the ladies.
“Ciao Bella” he said as he leaned up against Lauretta’s locker, a toothpick playing see saw with his tongue and his two front teeth.
“Ciao,” she accentuating her lips into the ‘O’ as she shut her locker and nudged past his right shoulder. She seemed completely unamused by him.
Mauricio liked how Lauretta didn’t put up with his tactics. He had yet to meet a girl who could match his energy let alone his attitude. Within two months she was pregnant and four they were married.
-
It is a hard love story to compete with, but Bella wanted more than ever to find her own true love. As she sits there alone the Seinne crying to her parents about how she still hasn’t found her Mauricio, they try to cheer her up through the phone.
“Bella, amore mio. You are only seventeen, hai tiempo.”
“But dad! You and mom were SIXTEEN WHEN YOU MET!” Her voice gradually increasing as she yells frustratingly through the phone.
She thinks to all of the times a stupid boy has broken her heart before. She doesn’t like to use the adjective stupid to classify a gender, in fact, she hates when her friends generalize by saying “I hate all men.” But at this certain moment in time, she really does think this one was stupid. She forces herself to stop crying, she walks over to a crepe stand and gets herself a strawberry and Nutella, walks back to the riverside and looks up at the Eiffel Tower. She thinks to herself how she’s always gotten through the worst of times. Her favorite quote has to do with an arrow being pulled all the way back in order to shoot forward. Bella coincidentally sees a chic girl walk past with a sleeve of tattoos, scrap-book-like looking, one of them of a broken heart emoji.
“Excuse-moi. D'où as-tu eu tes tatouages?” I say wiping my last tear with my left hand and simultaneously finishing the last bite of my crepe.
“Juste la-ba. Putain les hommes, am I right?” She laughed.
I smiled to myself. Yeah, she was right… fuck men. My heart has been broken before and look at me still surviving and shit.
Maybe it is Bella’s OCD that makes her feel she needs to follow the same timeline as her parents in exactly the same way. Maybe it is her anxiety that creates the image in her head of being forever alone with two cats to feed. Maybe it is her ADHD that causes her to talk too much on most of her first dates and ends up not really getting to know the guy, but somehow still falling in love with him. Maybe it is her depression, that keeps her locked in this cycle of self loathing, thinking she needs someone else to complete her. Maybe there is no label for a seventeen year old girl with heartbreak and love all mixed up and confused inside as she grows through life.