This Isn’t About The (Fall Out) Boys

This Is Love, Isn’t It?

This is me standing in the arch of the door/ Hating that look that's on your face / That says there's another fool like me. I’m blasting “Calm Before the Storm” as if it being on Fall Out Boy’s first official album gives me street cred. I make sure it’s roaring out of the rolled-down windows of my red Prius as I pull up to the scholarship graduation brunch. I adore the song, the album, the band, yes, but I’m really just putting on a show to make a boy notice me. He’s a punk kid or a ska kid or whatever I don’t even care anymore.

We lived down the hall from each other freshman year. He wooed every single person interested in men in the building, if not on the campus. He had this way of letting you in just enough to make you feel special, without really telling you anything. Oh, and he played the guitar. Like, all the time.

He had a face like the boy I had a crush on in high school. The only boy who would occasionally beat my scores in German. The boy who joined his friends in pretending I was hot to mock me, who stood too close to me at the whiteboard, who confided in me things he never told his friends. The boy I almost ruined my relationship for. The relationship I was still in when I liked the ska boy but that would die before the next. The relationship that would take another whole essay to explain why it had been dead-in-the-water for years.

The night I ran screaming from our dorm into the night, College Boy was one of those who followed me, the one they elected to approach me, weeping on Smoker’s Rock. This was after the hospital but before medical leave. He put his arm around me, and we sat there as I cried, as he dropped vague stories about his own struggles, as I said things I probably regretted later.

Mere months before school year’s end, I would clench my fist at my side. We stood nose-to-nose in the dorm hallway, glaring at each other. My covered-up words on our RA’s inspirational group poster hung on the wall to my left. Covered-up because he thought he had a monopoly on mental illness. My fist twitched. I didn’t punch him that day. I wish I had.

Years later I still have a crush on the boy who couldn’t care less about me. He pretends we have some kind of bond over suffering, but I know better. I know better but it doesn’t stop me from debasing myself. Humiliating myself by confessing my crush to friends in a fit of mania. By performing a coolness that I don’t have. By lingering and longing.

Then he graduates and I’m free.

It’s the summer after graduation and I’m walking home from work. It’s dark, just after midnight. I could’ve driven, I know. I should’ve driven. But the pain I’m in from standing all shift means nothing compared to both the calories I’ll burn and the punishment and melancholy I deserve. So, it’s midnight and I’m staring at the bank of windows on the school across the street. There’s a light shining from within, creating seven lines of vertical light. I unplug my headphones so my fans can hear the lines of ‘Saturday’ on my Snapchat video. I’m coasting on potential towards a wall / At a hundred miles an hour. It’s the summer after graduation and I’m tanking fast.

The boy I met last semester, the one who was sweet and sensitive and acted like he cared, well, he’s using me for sex and support while stalking his ex-girlfriend. I drop him off at court one day. There’s a restraining order. I know this, and I keep going back. I’m in love with him and he treats me like his girlfriend without any of the status. Every time he tells me he’s busy he’s running back to her. We laid in bed once, singing along to Dr. Horrible, each taking the gendered parts, playing the fools in love. I get off work and I ignore my pain, driving over to his apartment. He calls and I’m driving over to his apartment in minutes. I call and he’s busy.

I was supposed to be better than this. I got out of one problematic relationship just to be sucked into another. I graduated, something that once seemed impossible, with a four-year degree and top marks and yet here I am, disgracing myself for some jackass. But I love him, I love him, and I don’t know what love is without usurping my self-respect for someone else. That’s love, isn’t it?

I’m standing across from the school that I hear young, excited voices from each morning during the week as I lie in bed. I’m standing across from the school, my legs, shaking, my tired eyes trying to produce more tears. All this is running through my head and I check my phone to see if he’s texted. He hasn’t.

At the end of the summer I move home to my parents. Months later he has a permanent new girlfriend. It’s not me.

I’m careening around the curve in the road. I’m late for work, probably. We haven’t opened yet so I’m not sure I care. Ohio is green, so green, and the trees are flowering in the mall parking lot and there’s no one else here. It’s not even that early but who needs to be at an open-air mall in the middle of nowhere before it opens? I fly around the curve and into the parking lot. I park a few spaces over from my usual spot so no one will see me crying if they pull up. I turn up the volume on Infinity on High. I cast a spell over the West / To make you think of me / The same way I think of you / This is a love song in my own way.

I know he doesn’t love me. That much is clear from the way he only reaches out when he remembers I exist. I send Snapchat after Snapchat, refreshing constantly to see if the little arrow’s been opened. Waiting and waiting and waiting for the reply.

I am melancholic, struggling with my own demons on the side, my brain begging me to kill myself every night. I am face down in the shower. I am staring out the window from the back seat. I am trudging behind my parents on forced evening walks. And all the time I am refreshing and refreshing and waiting.

The red flags were there. Again. “Devil’s advocate.” I’m sitting in the backseat of his car (his friend gets shotgun) as we cruise down backwater roads on our way to McDonald’s. A beat pulses through the shitty speakers and he sings along, even to the N-words. He reaches up under my shirt as we watch his friend play video games and then when it’s over, he jokes about gang-raping me while I’m asleep. I smile blandly and force myself to forget.

I want to be loved so desperately that I turn from the red flags. I push down the self-hatred. I demean myself over and over, thinking it subtle, thinking it attractive. The relationship fizzles, it dims, it stretches into nothing. I breathe a sigh of relief until the rage comes.

Months later he has a permanent girlfriend. It’s not me, but I feel sorry for her.

There’s no Fall Out Boy song for my partner now. He is ‘80s synth and modern feminist rap and Bollywood hits and I think I like myself this time.

Katarina Schultz (she/they) lives and writes at the intersection of media, mental health, and hope. Bylines include Screen Rant, Comic Book Resources, National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and Uncomfortable Revolution. Kat lives in LA with her cat, Bug. She simply wants to make you feel.