Journals: True Love by Lorenzo Moscato
Let me be straight with you for a moment, dear readers; I have completely accepted the fact that there’s a darkness within me, and it feels the freest I’ve ever been. Because of that, I’ve decided I want to write about something that’s been on my mind for the longest of times…love. Yes, I love and have loved. This isn’t a philosophical thing I wanna talk about, more a confession of sorts. Doc told me I should talk about the things on my mind, and since the season of love is almost upon us, figured I should set the record straight on how I feel about it and my past.
To be quite honest, love itself makes one do crazy things. In this first example, we go way back…more than 20 years in fact, to when I was but a child. Barely into my teens, I experienced my first love. Ah, Stacey…I miss Stacey. My first kiss, my first real girlfriend. I kept her hidden from my friends and family. We were too young; my family would never understand the kind of girl I was seeing. We met through mutual friends at school, shared the same taste in music, liked the same movies, liked the same sports, and better still we only saw each other at the end of school each day (she went to a different school). This meant I still had the freedom to hang out with my buddies, play sports, etc. 13 was a great time to be alive.
I was a confused teenager at the time, you know? Everything I knew about love came from music, movies, and hormones. That’s pretty fucked up if you think about it. We’re so brainwashed by society…we’re told what to think, how to feel, what to eat, how to love. But what can ya do? I was a dumb kid who didn’t know any better. Maybe that’s why when the inevitable happened, when Stacey dumped me, I was so heartbroken.
Depression set in, and I think this was the first time I actually contemplated suicide. A dumb kid going through heartbreak…that was me! I felt like it was the end of the world, and Stacey didn’t even give me a reason as to why we were breaking up. Her friends, which were also my friends, tried to make me feel better, inviting me out to movies or to hang out. It did help, but there was always this nagging thing in the back of my mind…why did she break it off? Everything was going great, we were happy. We would hold hands, kiss, everything a boyfriend and girlfriend do when they’re dating. We even told each other that we loved each other (my first time saying that!) and it felt right, but it was a stupid love…a love that, when I finally discovered what was going on behind my back, would be my very first time doing…something else.
I was finally on the right track to getting over Stacey, to healing and feeling better again. It had been a couple of months since the break-up (the entire relationship was probably about three months in total, I was an idiot kid alright?) and I was feeling particularly good. I was playing hockey, doing well too, when I saw her again. She was in the stands, there with some of our mutual friends to watch the game. I was excited because she had never come to watch our team play before. Some other background there, I was pretty damn good as a defender on my team, my coach even had me on the top pairing. So, that night, ex-girlfriend in the stands, I played my fucking heart out. Put up some points, did some heavy hitting, I was on fire all night. After the game, she even came over to talk to me, even congratulated me. That was all it took to give me that little glimpse of hope. Love had come back into my heart and my mind, and I was thinking we’d get back together. But now was not the time, no, I had to be patient and had to wait for the right time to bring up the topic of ‘us’ again. Instead of trying to be awkward, I asked her to come to our next game and she agreed. That would be the night I would finally get the courage to talk to her about it. But, as luck would have it, love is a crazy thing that enjoys stomping on your heart.
The night of the game came. I was excited and anxious, maybe even a bit nervous. I walked out of the locker room and onto the ice, doing our pre-game warm-up. I checked up in the stands and there she was, but she wasn’t alone. Some older guy was there with her. He looked to be about 30 or so. Since we were barely into our teens, I immediately thought he was her dad or uncle or something. I waved at her, she waved back and smiled my way, my heart fluttered, I felt love again for the first time in months. I was going to win her back, she was going to…wait, is she holding hands with this old guy? Kinda weird, but if it’s her dad or something, not entirely strange. Puck drops, my focus is 100% on the game, and not embarrassing myself in front of the girl I love. I have an amazing night, like the previous game. After the game, I get a compliment from the guy I think is her dad, he tells me I’m the best defenseman he’s seen in a decade and I should be in the National Hockey League in no time. It feels good. Stacey comes to talk to me afterwards and this is where love decided to destroy me…
She reveals that she was not here to get back together, she was here to get closure, to end us. She tells me she wants to just be friends. Me, smiling like a big idiot, and thinking there’s still hope, agrees to it. Then she leaves me there, sweaty and tired, and kisses the older guy right on the lips. It finally dawns on me…she left me for an older guy. Like, same age as her dad, older guy. It was a weird feeling, like I wasn’t sure what I had just seen, and it was just…funny. I stood there in awe, and began to laugh. My buddy, Frankie, came over to see what was going on, and I told him. He had this stupid look on his face like I just made it up, but it was true, I had definitely just seen her kiss the old guy. Frankie suggested we hit up our friends and find out what the fuck is actually going on, for sure one of them would know what was really happening. And they confirm my suspicions; she left me for a thirty-something year old biker dude. At that moment, I felt like molten rock had just fallen into my stomach. I felt betrayed by my friends, betrayed and disgusted. The only thing I wanted to do at that moment…was to destroy everything in my path. But there was a voice…I guess you could call it the voice that everyone has been telling me that writes in my journal from time-to-time that I can’t see…and it whispers to me ‘be patient.’ So, I listen, I wait, and I accept the reality that Stacey and I will never be together again.
Another night comes, another hockey game, Stacey and her old man boyfriend show up. I’m disgusted at this point. She’s 13, he’s thirty-something. What the fuck are they even doing together? How could her parents allow this? I don’t play well that night. Too much on my mind. Some guy on the other team keeps ragging on me all night…I let him have it by crushing his skull against the ice during a little bit of shoving and am tossed from the game. ‘He deserved it,’ I tell myself. The voice tells me I need to cool down because if I don’t, I’ll miss my chance. After a cold shower, I go to the parking lot. No ride, shit. Guess I’m walking home again. Then a car pulls up and it’s, you guessed it, the old guy. He’s offering a lift home. Stacey isn’t with him and he tells me he and I should talk about everything that’s been going on because I deserve as much. I didn’t hear anything else…didn’t see anything else…except the blood. It was everywhere, all over the parking lot. And there was someone laying on the ground, face down, crimson everything. My arms ached and I guess I was swinging my hockey stick. It lay shattered at my feet. I had done something…something terrible. I knew one thing for certain; I had just killed a man, that much was certain from the fact that the shattered part of my stick was run through this man’s skull. It went in through the gaping mouth, out the back end. Teeth, skull, brain matter, blood, I couldn’t tell what was what.
Strangely enough, I began to calm down. We were in the dark, no one had seen, nothing would happen to me. The voice told me it would be okay. Just take the broken stick out of his head, burn it, no one would suspect because who would believe that a 13-year-old kid had just killed someone? Besides, you were walking home. Stopped by McDonald’s to maybe get a burger and a Coke, there’s no way you were at the same place this random old man was murdered. Murdered. You murdered someone. You snuffed out someone’s light in a fit of rage. No, not you, I. I did this. It needed to be done, for my love, for my hope, for the light to come back into my life. For Stacey. She was confused is all, I’ll show her that he wasn’t right, I was the right guy for her. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Before leaving, I pulled the stick from the man’s head, it made a popping sound when it came out, and I threw it in a dumpster where the arena had other broken sticks. No one would think twice to check it out. No one.
I grabbed the bus, taking it the few blocks to Stacey’s house. Her friends had invited me over once for her birthday months ago, but I never went because we had just broken up. I pulled the hood up of my jacket and walked up to the house. The house was dark except for a solitary window on the second floor. Her bedroom. Stacey would listen to me. She’d understand I did what I did for us. I did it to rescue her from that fucking pedophile. A quick check around the home told me the car was gone, which meant her parents were out for the night. I didn’t want anyone to notice, sticking to the shadows and entered the home through the unlocked back door. The adrenaline began pumping, it felt like my blood was on fire inside my veins.
I made my way up the stairs, being as quiet as mouse. I reached her bedroom door and then…then the voice came back. I looked down to see what it was trying to tell me, and in my hands was a kitchen knife I had taken. The steel shone brightly from the light coming in from Stacey’s bedroom. She would listen to what I had to say. Love would not allow her to ignore me. I refused to be fucking ignored! I didn’t mean to hurt her. But she wasn’t going to listen to me…she wasn’t going to understand. She was trying to ignore me and pushing me away. Didn’t she understand that I loved her? Didn’t she understand that she was destroying me by not accepting me? I was a freak to her. Me? A freak? She was the one fucking some old mother fucker! NOT ME! NO! NO NONONONONONO!!!!!!! So, what was I to do? I needed to find out if she actually had a heart, so I used my knife to cut it out.
This is the important thing you need to remember from this first story; love…love makes you do crazy things.
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