The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one person.

We went to a party once on the beach. Everyone was dressed in black and white. There all of them from my high school I never talked to spun around us like drunken winds. Yes and you were there and you were there but oh Auntie Em you were not. But he was there, and I was there, and then so was she. She being the prettiest ugly step sister that no one should ever have. The best friend and the most wounded of birds I should ever have the displeasure of caring for. But at the time I had no idea she would become as toxic to me as she would become. It was your typical Florida summer night beach culture party. I was unfortunately too sober because I remember how hot and humid it was. You can never feel as cute and desirable as you wish to appear when the weather is against you. Teenage hopefully romantic terror is realized when you hair flattens and your eyeliner begins to melt. We sat outside on the deck as the party buzzed on for hours. It was a black and white sideshow. There was your inside bar with a looking to get laid college dropout pretending to be a bar tender. There was your posse of under dressed (nearly naked) 18 year old something or others dancing on tables. There was the odd party host walking about with a snake around his neck. He later for some reason ends up on the roof. How he got up there and how he gets down I never found out. And then there’s the drunken stranger wandering in the parking lot next to the house. We watch this man for nearly an hour stumble around the cars. He’d fiddle with the locked handles of several cars only to be defeated and then rest upon their hoods for several moments in a near comatose state. I thought the highlight of the evening was watching this man piss all over parking lot. We laughed endlessly as he tried to scale the deck. He’d tug at the bricks and try and pull himself up but would repeatedly fall back down. Eventually someone pulled the stranger up to our level. Well of course he decided to sit right down…into my lap. I immediately leapt up to get away from the drunken stranger who had just urinated in the parking lot and not washed his hands. But he grabbed me and pulled me back at him. So I began to struggle with him and scream. I thrashed back and forth but he was unbelievable strong. Well wouldn’t you know that at that moment PC jumped up and did something almost heroic. He pulled the drunkard off me and started fighting with him. The couch we were sitting on went flying off the back of the porch. And poor PC was trapped in a huge headlock. It’s silly I know. A headlock of all things isn’t so noble. But it was knightly enough for me. Eventually the two were separated and the drunkard wandered off. I was still terribly shaken up…well because I am dramatic. After disappearing to go smoke my evil stepsister let’s call her M.E.S.S. (My Evil Step Sister) finds myself and PC terribly frazzled, but doesn’t have the capacity to care much at all. So PC insists on driving me home and then says he’ll go back and pick up M.E.S.S. when she’s done drinking herself into a coma. Oh I think I’ve forgotten to mention something important. PC has a secret. For weeks he teased me with it. He’d say there was something important he wanted to tell me but then would never have the courage to say it. Well obviously the not knowing was killing me. I detest secrets. So as he’s driving me home I’m drilling him about what he could possibly be hiding from me, but he managed to deflect my questioning with charming comments as always. I never knew which way was up when he talked. I found myself lost amongst the lies most evenings with him. It wouldn’t be until my birthday party that he would finally tell me what he couldn’t manage to say all that time. I can recall driving home alone that night after he dropped me off at my car at M.E.S.S.’s house. He said something witty and closed my car door for me. The moon was huge and there was water puddled in the streets from the afternoon rains. I called a friend who had moved away nearly a year before. The friend you always call when things don’t make any sense. You don’t call to complain or for them to fix your problems. You just call to listen. Because the sound of their voice makes you forget how upset you were. They’re the friend you put up on a pedestal as being greatly intelligent and intuitive. And they’re the friend you wish you could be more like. I did feel better after we talked like always. But that didn’t stop me from sitting in my driveway for an hour. I cried a lot that summer, more than any before and hopefully more than any to come. I cried because I couldn’t understand my situation. I wondered what PC wasn’t telling me. And most of all I cried because I was lonely. I wanted him to love me so that I could understand love. I wanted him to realize that he needed me. How deeply I needed to be needed would lead to my own destruction.