jamie jinx You played with my hair, and we fell asleep on the grass. Thank you. I forgot to tell you that I did want you to kiss me- 020825 ... jinx and now you have-thank you for being soft- 020929 ... Mandy That look in your eyes is still the same. Is mine, too? 030204 ... paintedmarbles this is killrhythm but im gonna be known as paintedmarbles now because i wanna forget what i wrote before. even though i still feel some of the same things. anyway, for future reference, this is me..jamie. 030218 ... um sorry that would be where are you? 071116 ... raze i never knew what made him the way he was. i didn't know his mother. his father didn't have any meanness in him. i've known bullies, and jamie wasn't one of them. i don't think he meant to be bad. he just didn't know how to be good. i only saw him a few times over the years. something always went wrong when he was around. his idea of a pillow fight was hitting my sister in the face hard enough to give her a black eye. he always played too rough, and then he would smile this awkward little smile that seemed to say he was sorry for whatever he did, though he didn't know what he'd done or why or how to say he was sorry. he tried to drown me once. i was twelve. he grabbed me from behind and held me underwater in the deep end of the pool. he wouldn't let go. i was big for my age, but i hadn't finished growing into my body yet. he had. he was two years older than me. he was strong. i thought i was going to die. i couldn't get free until i elbowed him in the chest. it's hard to hit someone underwater. all those molecules. all that resistance. i put everything i had into it. i felt bursa connect with ribcage and he loosened his grip. when i looked at him there was nothing in his eyes. he wasn't smiling. i called him an asshole. i thought i'd get in trouble for that. i didn't. i learned when someone tried to kill you it made it okay for you to swear at them. i filed that piece of information away for the next time someone tried to kill me. the last time i saw him, he came over to the house when there weren't any adults around. they let that happen. we played eight-ball on my stepfather's pool table. jamie wanted to play for money. he tried every dirty trick he could think of. he grabbed my cue stick and moved the balls around when i was lining up a shot. he wouldn't let me use the bridge stick. he moved the cue ball wherever he wanted when was his turn. he took another shot after he missed. he lost. "double or nothing," he said. we played again. he cheated again. he lost again. when it was time for him to pay up, he said he didn't have any cash on him. i didn't want his money anyway. he smoked a cigarette he wasn't supposed to smoke in the backyard, smiling his sorry-not-sorry smile, and then he just left. i heard he chased a girl into the street with a kitchen knife and her mother had to call the police. i heard he grew up and had a son. two years ago i heard he was dead. i found the obituary online. he looked twenty years older than he was. somewhere in the torn map of a life that was his face in that black_and_white picture, there was the same smile i knew from when we were kids, that look of someone who didn't want to hurt anyone but didn't know how to do anything else. 210725 what's it to you? who go blather from