They play Red Jumpsuit Apparatus’s song “Face Down” on the radio all the time. I hate that song. I hate it so much it almost makes me scream. I also hate the song “99 Biker Friends” by Bowling for Soup. In fact, I hate any song along those lines.

I hate them, because I’m that boy that they’re mocking. I’m the one that they pick on. “Do you feel like a man/ when you push her around?”

No.

No, I don’t feel like a man.

I never, ever feel like a man. I feel like a damn monster.

All of the psychology books will tell you the same thing. They say that when a guy hits his girlfriend, he’ll be sorry. He’ll apologize, promise never to do it again, but then he will. I doubt any of those psychologists have ever hit their girlfriends. If they had, they would know that it’s impossible not to apologize.

After you hit a girl, she gets this look in her eyes. She wants you to tell her that everything will be okay, to hold her, to kiss her. So I do. I cry and say I’m sorry and hold her until she stops shaking.

We don’t talk about it. I don’t know what we would say to each other if we did. There’s always a day or so that goes by where we don’t even look at each other, or say hello in the halls. But we’re never really gone from one another.

I’ve tried to break up with her. I know I’m no good. I know that I hurt her and make her un-happy. But she stays with me. And really, the times that she’s hit me outnumber the times that I’ve hit her.

She’s usually the one to slug me in the shoulder, or kick me until I bleed. I have scars on my shins from her cute little white sneakers. She wants me to be quiet.

I’m what is known as a manipulative bastard. I twist her words so that she pays attention to me. Honestly, it’s very rare that I resort to physical attacks against her. But sometimes… god, sometimes, when she isn’t paying her utmost attention to me, I will do what I have to.

She as much as laughs at another guy’s jokes (or another girl’s for that matter, I’m not biased) and I boil inside. My chest feels too small for my heart, my eyes cannot focus, my mind races, and my fingers cannot keep from convulsing around each other.

What does she see in them? Why aren’t I good enough?

The summer.

The Brilliant One says that I am transparent. She says that every emotion I feel is displayed on my face. “The Scary-Boyfriend Face”, she calls it. I have to channel it to play my role on stage.

In scene nine, I get to have a mental breakdown. It’s fun. It really is. I scream on the floor about nightmares and earthquakes and nerves and unions. Screaming tears up the back of my throat, but it is fun.

Not so much in real life, but that’s why I’m an actor. Everything that isn’t fun in real life is fun on stage.

Actors and writers and artists of any sort are messed up. It takes a special mind to be an artist. You have to hate yourself a little bit, or a lot, and have had minor to major trauma occur. I’m a minor trauma case- divorce. Nothing terrible. But you had better believe that I hate myself. I hate myself with a passion!

She must, too. Or she wouldn’t be with me. People who hate themselves tend to stick together.

The Brilliant One says that I’m a ‘good person’. The Brilliant One wouldn’t like me if I were a bastard. How can I say I’m a bastard? But it’s not like The Brilliant One doesn’t have problems of her own. She writes novels. That takes dedication, and a large amount of existential writer type angst.

Purple draws comics. Manga. She’s got ‘daddy-issues’, as she calls it.

She Who Can Make up Fully Developed Characters on the Spot (SWCMUFDCOS-SW) is an actress, a writer, an artist, and a Live-Action role-player. Guess how many issues she has. I’ll give you a hint: lots.

The tour jeté gang wants to fix all of my problems.

Ricardo of Florence is an actor who only ever gets bit parts. He writes stories that he never finishes. He speaks in Shakespearian. He has… some… ‘gender’ issues, to say the least. Doesn’t mean we don’t love him.

Doesn’t mean we don’t love any of them.

I’m just saying that artists are messed up.

And I’m an artist, aren’t I? Yes. Of course I am. I act, I draw, I write, I sing. I’m good at a few of those. So it’s alright, isn’t it? It’s alright that I occasionally loose it around her. She’ll still be there for me.

She’s not home now. She’s got a summer job in Missouri. And I am in New Jersey, at an arts camp. For a month, I don’t have internet, or a cell phone. I can only write letters. I write her three letters, and got two.

And you know… After a while, I forget why I miss her. I found that She Who Makes Fully etc., Purple, and The Brilliant One are entertaining. I don’t miss the smell of her, or the way she looks when she’s tired. I don’t miss the pressure of a head on my shoulder or an arm linked with mine.

So I start to think that maybe I don’t need her. Maybe I don’t need to constantly control everything. It was okay to leave some things up to people’s free wills.

Then camp is over.

I get my cell-phone back.

And I get a text from her.

She misses me.

Damn it. I miss her, too.

Forget fate! Forget chance! Forget god-given free will! I want her back with me. I want to be with her, to hold her, to have something I can feel in control of. I don’t have lines to memorize anymore. I don’t have staging to worry about. I don’t have to think about pitches and audience and stage presence.

My life is out of my grasp again. I’m not on stage, I’m worthless, and I’m pathetic. There’s no façade anymore. This is me, weak, passive-aggressive, desperate. I played a man like this on stage, once. But he was worried about his steel empire, not his relationships.

A steel empire is a more legitimate reason to have so much angst.

And I wouldn’t be thinking about this right now if Gamer-Chick didn’t play that Red Jumpsuit Apparatus song so loudly.

No. I don’t feel like a man.

Happy?