Faded Muse (One & Done)

[TheUnknownAuthor]

Thanks to @kerry for the title!

So, I got a weird idea and this is what came of it. Not sure if story in the strictest definition, but 100% fiction, so maybe? Anyway, here's a thing I made that maybe doesn't entirely suck. Also, I tried to not assign the narrator a gender so that it could maybe be more relatable to anyone reading, but if I happened to slip and assign gender at any point that I missed, lemme know and I will fix. 

 

Faded Muse

By: The Unknown Author

 

If someone asked me when it was that I knew I was in love with you, I’d have to come up with a convincing story to tell them since the reality is that I knew when I first saw you, but who would believe that a third grader had enough emotional awareness and life experience to know what love truly was? I’d probably tell them something cobbled together from pieces of films and literature I’d seen over the years, avoiding the more distinguishable details that a film or literature buff would recognize. ‘That sounds like a scene from Breakfast At Tiffany’s’ they’d say, and I’d have to feign ignorance and try to steer the conversation elsewhere to avoid more probing questions that would unravel my carefully spun web of lies.

 

The truth is that I did know I loved you when I walked into that classroom oh those many years ago. I’m sure people would dismiss my claims as just being a child moving to a new town, starting school in the middle of the year and glomming onto a girl I thought was cute because I was desperate for something comforting in a time where everything in my life was in upheaval. They’d claim the divorce of my parents had skewed my sense of value when it came to relationships, that you weren’t a pretty girl that I loved, but some sort of stand in for a mother that had forfeited her parental rights to follow a Steely Dan cover band around the country because she’d found love in the strong arms of the drummer.

 

There’s a modicum of truth to the statement, I can’t deny that, I did miss my mother at the time, but the notion that a peer would be seen in that light is ridiculous, Mrs. Garvy, our teacher that year was always meant to be the surrogate mother I sought as evidenced by a few instances of me accidentally calling her ‘mommy’, one particularly embarrassing time I’d done so during class and everyone had giggled and she’d quieted them and looked at me sympathetically. The thing about that time was that you hadn’t laughed, sure, maybe you hadn’t heard me or maybe you were genuinely focusing on the reading assignment, but you not laughing made me sure that my feelings for you were genuine and accurate, that I hadn’t misjudged you.

 

What was it about you that made me love you so instantly and completely? Like most attractions, it wasn’t as simple as finding you beautiful or smart or funny, it was a perfect storm of everything about you. I loved that you didn’t have your hair tied. The other girls had brightly colored scrunchies securing their ponytails or, in the case of the insufferable Heidi Montgomery, pigtails. I judged her so harshly for those pigtails, thinking how inferior she was to someone like you because she’d opted for such a juvenile hairstyle when you wore your hair down in preparation for adulthood. The way your ebony locks spilled down, cascading over your shoulders and back like a luxurious waterfall of healthy, shiny hair. I loved that you were reading when I walked into the room with the principal’s secretary while everyone else was talking or pretending to read. I loved that you were reading something above your grade level, that Pride and Prejudice spoke to you as a thing to be read when everyone else was reading Amelia Bedelia and Goosebumps. I loved that you answered Mrs. Garvy’s questions without worrying about people thinking you were a nerd because you knew the answers.

 

I’d started drawing when my mom left, working for hours on the pencil sketch of my bedroom window and the gnarled oak in the backyard with the remains of what, at one point in time had been a tire swing hanging from the largest branch like a prewar era relic, but my sketchbook soon became filled with you as my heart and mind were. I drew you without looking at you, drinking in the small details of your personality that made my drawings more real than just graphite on paper. I never stared at you, perfecting my ability to watch you without watching you, partly because staring is rude, but also because I’d been stared at before and I never wanted you to feel that kind of discomfort from me, choosing to only ever look at you with quiet reverence as one would a work of art in a museum.

 

At my old school, I’d struggled with my mom and dad fighting all the time, the walls of our house doing little to keep me from hearing the insults and the name calling, keeping me awake at night and exacerbating my already problematic nighttime control of my bladder. When the fighting was at its worst I struggled with my daytime control as well, going from barely making it to the bathroom after being on the verge of tears in class as I asked to be excused, sure that everyone knew I was nearing an accident to drenching my pants in the middle of class. I can still hear the sound of liquid dripping onto the linoleum beneath my chair as if it’s happening all over again, the echoes of shame from a lifetime ago haunting me to this day.

 

They don’t ever tell you this in the first day of school assembly’s or give the information to your parents during the parent teacher night conferences to pass along to you, but the nurse’s office smells like a diaper pail that’s been doused in bleach or some other incredibly strong cleaning substance that somehow, despite its ability to sanitize, still hasn’t perfected the art of odor removal. They also don’t tell you that, unless your parents have provided a change of clothes in case of an accident, which I’m sure only the lower grades have to concern themselves with, you’re stuck wearing whatever happens to be in the lost and found unless a parent is called to bring in a change of clothes, which I’d somehow rationalized as being infinitely more humiliating, completely missing the part where my parents immediately knew something had happened because I arrived home wearing a hodgepodge of clothing not adequately suited for my age or gender carrying my wet clothes in a bag with a note explaining “the incident” to them in, what I assume, was excruciating detail.

 

My lapse in control became a new talking point in the near constant battle between my mom and dad, one blaming the other for damaging me psychologically without either of them taking a breath to actually talk to me about any of it, the consensus was that their bitter fighting was the most important thing to them in that moment, so I was sent to school with a change of clothes to be kept in a cabinet in the nurses office with a bit of tape with my name and grade written on it in permanent marker, the kind of marker that ensures that no one will ever forget that you’re the third grader that will probably need to change their clothes midday because they can’t seem to keep from wetting themselves. When more than one accident began occurring in the course of a school day, my parents slapped the band-aid of sending me to school in my overnight protection on the problem, the shelf of the cabinet in the nurse’s office with the baggy of my clothes in it now being accompanied by a second baggy with a small stack of the absorbent garments inside.

 

“Baby”, “Retard”, “Piss Pants”, these became my nicknames used openly by bullies and quietly by everyone else. My normal nighttime issues had kept me from sleeping over with anyone in my class, ensuring that the deep bonds of telling scary stories in a circle of sleeping bags in someone’s living room were never realized. I had friends, but they all but evaporated when the accidents began happening, and I don’t hold any ill will toward them, self preservation in grade school dictates that you can’t be friends with someone that pees their pants on the daily lest you become a pants wetter by proxy.

 

I was surprised that you gave me the time of day on my first day of school, shamefully daydreaming that you’d somehow want to be best friends with me instantly despite our not wearing the same shoes, which is the most ironclad base for schoolyard friendship known to man in perpetuity. You strode up to me on the playground and I thought maybe you were going to meet some of your friends beyond the bench I was sitting on, but you stopped in front of me and said ‘hi’, two little letters that fused into the warmest greeting I’d heard in the better part of a year from anyone, especially someone in my peer group. You had no way of knowing that I was wetting my diaper when I looked up at you and returned your greeting with an equal amount of warmth, though I probably overshot it and sounded so shocked and nervous that you of all people were talking to me that you may very well have guessed that I was peeing as the words left my lips.

 

It’s worth mentioning that you were the reason I stopped peeing my pants, despite our first interaction including me drenching my diaper. I wanted you to like me beyond just a polite greeting and introduction, and someone like you would never, could never, like someone that had to wear actual diapers because their nighttime protection had grown inadequate to handle the volume and frequency of their daytime accidents. You flipped a switch in me that pulled me from my depression and withdrawal from human interaction and gave me the muse that I needed to regain my control and bid diapers goodbye forever, at least until puberty hit.

 

By the time we got to high school, we’d grown apart, as kids do. You became the popular girl, the beloved prom queen in the making, the head cheerleader, the rich girl that had her own car to chauffeur around her equally popular friends on trips to the beach or ditch days to the mall. I, on the other hand, continued my art and found little interest in interacting with people so I could spend every moment I could sketching and honing my craft to become a true artist once school ended. I’d developed a diaper fetish and used nearly every cent I earned slinging milkshakes at the local burger joint to purchase things to satiate the urges I found becoming more and more frequent and urgent as I neared adulthood.

 

There was still somewhat of a sparkle of recognition in your eyes when you and your friends would show up after a football game for dinner and you’d see me in the window with my apron and paper hat on, my face shimmering beneath the florescent lighting with the grease of the kitchen and my own teenage greasiness. Your friends would quietly chuckle at my appearance, but I was focused on you and the confidence you exuded as you ordered for everyone, the perfection of your manicure when you handed me your card, one with your own name on it rather than one of your parents that you’d been given “in case of emergencies” one weekend when your dad went on a business trip and you spent the entire time he was gone wearing diapers in your room and fantasizing about sharing your desire to be treated like a baby with the girl you’d loved since third grade.

 

I’d never think you’d give up your muscular boyfriend for me, but I’d begun constructing a scenario where I’d tell you everything about my secret desires and you’d sit there listening to me, actually listening too, not the distracted listening while texting or browsing the internet that so many people nowadays do, the kind of listening that you can see the information entering the person’s mind through their ears and registering as valuable information worthy of their time and attention. In this scenario I’d talk for what seemed like ages, my words spilling out of me in an attempt to keep talking to prolong the inevitable point where you respond from occurring. The you of this scenario would turn your attention to my waistline when I eventually confessed to wearing a diaper to keep from embarrassing myself during this meeting and beckon me to show you said diaper, and I’d hesitate, looking around nervously despite this being my fantasy scenario devoid of all life save for you and me, and then I’d stand up slowly only to have you take the reigns and unbutton and unzip my pants to pull them down to reveal the swollen and yellowed diaper around my waist, the babyish designs between the landing strips for the tapes making your lips quirk into a heavenly sweet smile.

 

Too much of a coward to actually approach you in person, I concocted a plan that would accomplish my goal of sharing my secret with you while removing the face to face element I dreaded. I bought a pack of insert pages for the year book and wrote everything out for you, professing my love and how you were the one good thing that I can look back on my time in school at and feel nothing but positive about. I’d written about my struggles with continence and relationship with diapers and humiliation that shaped me into the person I was today, making you aware that you were the person that helped me overcome my shameful accidents and that it felt so perfectly right to me that you be the one to usher me back into diapers through loving babying and compassion for the little friendless loser that just needed a Mommy to take care of them. I signed my manifesto and put my cell number below that and waited for the perfect opportunity to slip the pages into your yearbook.

 

Having all the same classes together, another bit of fate I’d included in the novelization of my life to that point, meant that on that last day of school before graduation, when you and your friends were huddled off in a corner of the room, your purses and backpacks at your desks along with your yearbooks, that you’d already all signed and merely carried around in case any last minute well wishers outside of your social circle gathered up the courage to ask you if a mutual signing could be arranged, and I quickly slunk in and put my pages into your book before returning to my desk moments before you all returned to gather your belongings before you left class for the last time ever.

 

Every time my phone buzzed or chimed or rang after you left that day I was nervous it was you, until time dictated that it wasn’t ever going to be. Graduation came and went without so much as a look my way from you, my mind telling me you’d read what I’d written and been so horribly embarrassed by what I’d written either for me or for yourself, that you’d chosen to pretend it never happened to save me some embarrassment at having to be told you weren’t interested in me in that way and the hassle of you having to do so. Days bled into weeks and those gave way to months and finally years, and somewhere in that time frame I moved on, pushing you out of my mind and focusing on my art, moving to the big city to begin my adult life.

 

I still think about you sometimes, usually when I’ve carved out a little time to be, well, little, but you don’t have the same aura that you did when I loved you, you’re an avatar for the Mommy I want but haven’t met yet, a personal touch added to my fantasy because I’ve met you and heard you speak to me in person rather than a celebrity crush that I’d never meet, but you’re not the girl I fell in love with, she made something of herself and probably has a happy life and wonderful family of her own while I roll around on the mattress on the floor of the only apartment I can afford on the salary of a barista and starving artist in wet and or messy diapers that don’t fit as well as I’d like because they’re generic store brand ones and a food stained onesie with the lettering that used to declare me a ‘BABY’ in bubble letters long since faded to the point of being barely recognizable and play the part of baby for you the best I can.

 

A part of me wonders if you still have that yearbook and if the pages I’d deposited are still inside, unread, a destiny unfulfilled aging in a box in your attic or garage to be discovered when middle age hits you and you commence to reminiscing or one of your kids or grandkids finds it and you’re left having to explain the awkward tale of a geek that fell in love with you and wanted you to be their Mommy to them. I wonder if you’d try calling me, and if you did, would you give up when the number didn’t work because that was over a dozen phones and numbers ago for me, or would you look me up online and reach out on social media for coffee or maybe just to talk on the phone or video call or something. I do my best to push these hopeful thoughts from my mind when they crop up, as it usually just sets me on a path of feeling sorry for myself at being alone and doing nothing to try and change that with any of the real people I work with or interact with at stores or bars or wherever new potential mates congregate.

 

I try and convince myself to use you once again as a muse for change, to come out of my shell and find someone to love in the present as much as I loved you in the past, but you’ve faded like the words on my onesie, and don’t carry the same sway you held over me back then, rationalizing that if you’d wanted me to be better you would’ve said or done something to insert yourself into my life, but you didn’t and now you matter as much to my life as I do to yours.

 

I’m sure this will probably, at best, read as me being bitter and sad for forming an attachment to a person that never gave any indication they were even remotely interested in me besides being polite and friendly as they were with everyone, and at worst read as me turning an innocent person into the villain of my story for no reason other than they weren’t a mind reader that could detect my feelings and having not done so made them ignore them and me. None of these things are true, I’m happy with my life, I’m comfortable being alone, but everyone needs someone in their life to share the things they find important with and fulfill a desire to embark on an adventure with that person.

 

This isn’t meant to be a story about someone that wore diapers in school and grew up to want to wear them as an adult, nor is it meant to be a story about the girl that got away, it’s just something to write that maybe resonates with someone that maybe felt or experienced these things in their own life. Maybe they had someone they loved and it never worked out and they wonder what things might’ve been like if they had. If you’re reading this and find any of that true about yourself, I hope you know that another person doesn’t give you value, they may enrich your life and make you feel special or more important, but that’s just magnifying what’s already there in you.

 

You’re wonderful and deserving of happiness but you’re not not that if you’re single. Love yourself and be yourself and someone will come along that loves that weird person that paints their toenails each a different color, they’ll love that you, as an adult, still covers your eyes during the scary parts of a movie, they’ll be the one that smiles at you when other people give you funny looks when you snort when you laugh.

 

I’m a firm believer that there’s someone out there for everyone, unfortunately the world is a big place and subscribing to that belief kind of means you have to subscribe to a broader scope of fate or destiny to work to bring you together if great distance exists between you, and maybe that’s just me being a person that’s watched too many movies and developed into a hopeless optimist, but maybe my someone is reading this now, or maybe my someone found some pages they don’t remember buying in a yearbook they never opened once school ended for them and we’ll have a good laugh about the missed connection from so many years ago.

 

Stranger things have happened, right?

Edited March 4, 2022 by TheUnknownAuthor
Added title

[kerry]

Title suggestions: "Faded Muse," "Missed Connection."

?

[TheUnknownAuthor]

15 hours ago, kerry said:

Title suggestions: "Faded Muse," "Missed Connection."

?

Changed! Thank you very much for the submission! I also credited you at the top for the title.