Loved - A Novel (13 page)

              While we were shooting, the photographer put on some music that caught my attention. The woman’s voice was sometimes clear and sometimes gritty. She sang words that were so poetic and yet painted such an honest picture of real life: a poor small town girl, friends lost, broken love.  “A wind that blows as cold as it gets blew out the light in my soul,” she sang. Her name was Patty Griffin. The photographer let me borrow the CD but I bought my own copy almost right away.  I had that familiar feeling of deeply connecting to songs, being moved by the beauty of a melody and finding peace in the company of words. 

             
June, 2003.

A group of old high school friends were going to a Dave Matthews Band concert and camping in Pittsburgh. I drove up to join them, having heard what fun they’d had the year before. I wore ripped jeans and a white tank with green polka dots, styled my blonde hair straight and looked in the mirror for a moment before we loaded the car. I didn’t look particularly different from the way that I had being in high school, yet there was something that made me feel like I stood out a little more. I had been so plain before but I couldn’t quite put a finger on what might be different.  Maybe it was just confidence or maybe it was all in my head.

              Jeff Meyers was there and he hardly recognized me. It may have been because he was wasted by the time we found the guys or maybe it was because he didn’t expect me to be there since I lived so far away. I had been hoping he would be there, knowing he was a DMB fan from our days in biology class where I sat behind him staring at the band logo on the back of his hoodie.

              “Kim Carlson!” he shouted, finally figuring out who I was. “What are you doing here? It’s so good to see you!” 

              He showed a lot of enthusiasm for someone who hadn’t really ever been my friend to begin with but I beamed and let him hug me tightly. We talked for a few minutes about what I had been up to, which always sounded amazing when I summarized: “I go to school for music business. I want to be a tour manager. I was in Vegas for an award show last month...” It was just life to me but getting to explain it to someone outside of that world, even I became freshly excited by it. 

              “What about you?” I asked.

              “I’m at school in Ohio, studying art. I want to be a museum curator or something like that.”

              I smiled at him, my eyes huge with awe, though I would have thought it was cool if he had said he wanted to be a museum janitor. Everything he did was cool. I kept an eye on him all night but I found that I was able to just relax and be myself and enjoy the music and the evening with friends.  For a short time, I was able to set aside the monitor that I always seemed to have focused on what others might be thinking of me. I let myself forget my worry about what was going to happen with Chase or when I might finally be who I was hoping to become. Who I was now was enough and that felt good.

              I considered the trip a success and headed back to Nashville, where I was still working at Betsey Johnson. I had a great manager who was helping me become a better sales person and I was really enjoying learning about fashion. We put on a fashion show at a club downtown that was a huge success.

One day, I was filmed for a show on CMT with my TV host friend helping a girl pick her dress for a red carpet event. She had won a contest to attend the event with her favorite artist. We set it up so that the cameras would watch her come into the store and I greeted her. She told me about the contest and what she was hoping to wear and I helped her pick out some things to try on. Then, she purchased her favorite item, a long black dress with purple ruffles at the bottom. They even filmed me talking to the camera about Betsey Johnson and why that dress was the best choice for their contest winner.

When the show aired, I picked myself apart. Why did I wear that shirt?  The camera does add ten pounds.  And I talked way too fast. I still loved it - I would just have to do better next time.

              Senior year of college began that fall. Anna had graduated so I moved off campus into an apartment with Brittany. We would go downtown to the dance clubs twice a week, dressed in pinstriped pants or jeans, tank tops or corsets and dance until three a.m. Then, since I was underage and had had much less to drink, I would drive her car home and she would roll down the window and demand we go through the McDonald’s drive-through. 

“Pleeeeease Kim!” She yelled, leaning out the window with her blonde hair wild in the wind.

“I’m so tired, can’t we just go home? You don’t want McDonald’s anyway. You know you’ll regret it tomorrow.”

“Please please please!” 

I got in the left turning lane and signaled.

The mornings that followed, I would sleep in till noon.  I had some hard and uninteresting classes that semester. Instead of rising to the challenge, I found it easier to go to class only as many times as was required of me.

              Living with Brittany was difficult. She had a boyfriend who she suspected was cheating on her and who was always yelling at her and taking advantage of her kindness. He went to school forty minutes away and didn’t have a car so she drove him all over middle Tennessee. He didn’t have money so she bought him food.

              I knew she cared about me but in reality she was dealing with some serious issues, and since she was older and had a dominating personality, I found myself believing and agreeing with everything she said. She taught me that food was the enemy so I ate green beans all the time, until I couldn’t take it anymore and would gorge on pizza. She would say, “Skinny feels better than food tastes,” as she made lunch out of a rice cake.

             
November, 2003.

              One Tuesday night, I was at home with Brittany watching TV.

              “Let’s order pizza! Would you eat some pizza?” she asked. 

              “Okay,” I said, “but no regrets. This is a treat and I’m not going to feel guilty about it.”

              I thought we’d eat the pizza, watch a movie and enjoy a quiet evening at home. Wrong. She swallowed three pieces and left me alone with some stupid show on TV. I felt like a complete cow, and the guilt that would have been avoided had this truly been a treat of an evening began to creep in. 

              Not knowing if Brittany was asleep, I turned the shower on so she wouldn’t hear me, though she probably would have cheered me on, and I stuck my finger down my throat.  It was hard to do, which surprised me, and I only got a little bit of the pizza to come up. I went to bed with pizza still in me, thinking I could feel it making me fat. It felt like poison.

              Trying to follow in her footsteps,
I was supposed to have two to three no-food days that week and I had failed, so to make up for it I didn’t eat anything till my birthday the following Sunday. The most frustrating thing was that it didn’t seem to make a difference. I still looked the same in my clothes. The numbers didn’t change when I stepped on the scale. My dissatisfaction with myself was a tricky little thing.  As soon as I learned to fight him in one form, he would morph into something else.

              Despite the cutting, the drinking and the fasting, I could never call myself a cutter, an alcoholic or a sufferer of an eating disorder. The times when I was trying out different types of destructive behavior were just that: trials. I don’t know if it was my faith, my sense of responsibility to my parents, a guardian angel, or something else, but despite the many moments when I walked to the edge of sanity, I never jumped.

              I started seeing a therapist at school. I told him I was worried about money. This was an issue I had never had to deal with before. I wasn’t spoiled by any means but we had never had to worry. I was about to go to Belmont West in L.A. for a semester and I knew I wasn’t going to have a job and I was going to have to rely on my parents. That is why I was working all the extra jobs but I couldn’t hold onto the money. 

We talked about Brittany and about how I wanted to save her from her troubles, and how I was trying to encourage her with little success to drop the boyfriend, to finish school and to drink less. I was afraid to keep repeating friendship patterns from my past, like the negative influence from Crystal or the codependency I had with Megan. I wanted things to be different with Brittany. He told me I could be her friend but beyond that I had to let it go, and that it was up to her what she did with my encouragement.

              There were so many other things I should have talked to the therapist about but I couldn’t bring myself to say those things out loud. I found it impossible to admit to my own struggles. It was much harder to see myself for who I really was when I was so busy criticizing myself for not being who I wanted to be.

             
December, 2003.

              One rainy day just before Christmas, I found myself listening to
“This Desert Life,” the
Counting Crows
album that had caused a pivot in my life a few years back. It had become my favorite album of all time. It made me feel—just, feel. As always, after a couple of songs, I wanted to call Chase as I longed to hear his voice. 

              There would never be enough people to talk to about him. I wished for someone who would listen to me read all his letters and tell all his stories. I could close my eyes and remember walking into that theatre in the marketplace, hearing him say, “Dry your eyes, Kitten.” I could feel him holding my hand and I could feel his pillow on my cheek. I hoped he knew that he was the love of my life and that when I thought of pure happiness, I thought of him; that when I thought of heartbreak, I thought of him and that when I dreamed, I dreamed of him. I wondered if he knew how badly I wanted to be with him.

              One Sunday I went to my new church with Lacey and cried three times throughout the service. I felt like God was putting a spotlight on me that said, “Bad person.” I looked at all the people looking at me and I mentally dropped to my knees and said, “Yes, I am sorry.” I felt that I had taken such advantage of God’s love. I was holding His hand and kicking Him in the shins at the same time, and it wasn’t working. I was supposed to hold His hand and walk with Him. I wanted to love Him, to live in His will and in His future. I wondered why I was wasting time.

              Dad came to Nashville to help me pack up my stuff to keep in storage while I was in L.A. Brittany’s stuff was already gone, back home in Ohio where she was headed to get a clean start. Dad painted the walls in our apartment from the blues and purples to white. It was strange walking through the empty apartment. My battered purple room was gone; Brittany’s bruised blue was gone. Two coats covered everything and it was like none of it had ever happened.

              I stayed with Lacey for a few nights while I had my last round of final exams. One night, I hung out with Ethan, Kyle and the guys who I hadn’t seen in so long.  It was easy for me to be around Ethan now; he was just one of the guys to me. I shared some of my bottle of Crown with them and for the first time, I took a few hits off of their pipe. 

              I went to the bathroom and stared at the polka dotted shower curtain for a few minutes.
I wonder if I can count all the dots,
I thought.
One, two, three, four...
I got to about fourteen before I lost track and started over. Finally realizing that I was high, I giggled at myself in the mirror and went back downstairs. We played our own game of TRL where I was me and Ethan was Carson Daly and the others were audience members. I was so glad for a chance to have laughter pour out of me again.

              Before I left Nashville, I wrote some letters to say goodbye. I never sent them but it helped me to close some of the chapters in my life. I had some anger, disappointment, and regret that I needed to let go of and to truly get away from.

              To Megan, I wrote that she had broken my heart. She had abandoned me. I would always kind of hate her for that.  I didn’t understand how she could wake up and say, “I don’t want my best friend anymore.” Still, I believed I was better off without her. Spitefully, I wished she could understand that. I also wrote that I was sorry for my part in it all. Despite my negative feelings toward her, I knew that her negative feelings toward me were well deserved. I closed by writing that I hoped she’d see me on TV someday and say, “Damn, I could be doing that too but I gave up. Kim is awesome.” I detested the way she abandoned her dreams.
Goodbye, Megan.

              To Brian I wrote that I knew I’d hurt him but he’d been lying to me all along too. I really hated him, but I also wrote that I hated myself for wasting so much of my time not being honest with either of us.  He did bad things and he lied, then he got caught and so he told new lies, and there was no limit to whom he would lie. I had lied too, but I’m the one who came clean in the end, I argued.
I’m glad you’re gone.

             
To Ethan I wrote that I was sorry to him and to God for whatever had happened between us. I was sorry I let my moments of low self-esteem or selfishness, or both, take over my good judgment. I was sad for him that he was selfish enough to take advantage of women. I felt lucky to have escaped knowing that my God is forgiving. I hoped he’d learn that too before it was too late. I hoped that he wouldn’t raise sons to treat girls like he did.
I’m letting go. Goodbye.

              To Anna, Brittany, and Lacey, I wrote that they were the people who made my college experience in Nashville so much fun. Whether I’d known them from the beginning like Anna or I had met them more recently like Lacey, I knew they’d always be in my heart and I hoped I would be in theirs too. I wrote that they were all such vibrant and inspiring people and such valued friends. I wished them love, happiness and the realization of all their dreams.
With love, Kimberly.