My Caterpillar Girl

There’s a woman in my life that I call my first girl crush. Clearly, I have known her for a very long time. While she is, undoubtedly, my first girl crush, I loved another female long before even her. Certain songs will always make me think of certain people, or situations.

I am pretty sure that this is true of most people. I started listening to The Cure in middle school, but I didn’t meet my Caterpillar Girl until high school. I get asked, upon occasion, how I came out as pansexual. I never did, really. I just realized when I understood the concept, that I always had been. I felt no confusion, or shame, the first time a girl kissed me, any more than the first time a boy kissed me, or the first time a person who wasn’t sure yet kissed me. I fall in love with people, not genitalia. It’s funny, what I am physically attracted to in men is much easier to define than what attracts me to women. But, I digress. I never kissed my Caterpillar Girl. She was my friend, though I now know that I was in love with her. She was my best friend, though I was never hers. High School is hell, you know. I went to a smallish high school. There weren’t that many freaks, so we stuck together. I know a lot of people who say they don’t know anyone from high school, anymore. Honestly, for me, most of those freaks that I needed and loved so much back then are still around and about in my life. For that, I am eternally grateful. My Caterpillar Girl was beautiful, she still is. We are similar in sense of humor and temperament, though she always leaned a little more to hippieness, where I went punk. Thirty years later, I can still tell you what she was wearing the first time that I saw her, her hair falling across one eye, just like mine. Okay. It was the late 80s. A lot of people’s hair fell across one eye. Being so similar in ways made high school, difficult. I have never been much of a casual dater, even in adulthood. Even in adulthood, she and I have been involved with the same men, at different or coinciding times, more than I have been involved with those who never knew her. No, we never had any kind of physical relationship. But I did crave being near her. My high school “sweet heart,” my then future exhusband, was always jealous of how I felt about her, and used it to tear me down, sometimes. He would hang out with her, and tell me how pretty she was, and how he thought I was pretty, too, even if no one else thought I was as pretty as her. If I couldn’t do something that he wanted to do, he would say that it’s okay, she would think he was important enough to spend time with him. But, I was in love with him, he told me so, and it was eventually true. He made me resent her. I carry a fuckton of guilt about it, even now. Things happened. Things unraveled. And one day, she was far away. High School ended. Life marched on. I married him. I knew when she came back, but I was embarrassed beyond belief at my actions. At not standing up for her. At picking the ‘wrong’ side. Then, I went away. And came back. Six months after I moved back, yes, I could tell you the date, I was at my favourite place (a bar) to do my favorite thing (dance) and there she was, twenty six years later. With one of the same friends we still shared from high school. I smiled. She smiled. I lowered my eyes and walked away. Her facial expressions still the same, her laugh the same. At some point during that night, I drunkenly crawled across a picnic table, in short skirt and boots, just to tell her that I had never not loved her. We are Facebook friends. I see her here and there. We chat. I have no idea what she actually thinks of me, now. I am clearly not trying to hide who she is, even though I have never mentioned her name in this. Do I want to have any sort of conversation about this with her? Not really. It was a long time ago. I complicated everything even further, like I do, in recent times. I’m not going out of my way to point her to this, at all. I will just still smile at the memes she posts. The memes that are so like the ones that I post. We listened to a lot of music in high school, driving, hanging out. There are songs that remind me of all of those places, and people, and specific moments, trapped in amber in my mind like personal music videos. We listened to a lot of The Cure. Sometimes, I wish she knew how very, very sorry that I am. That I will always be. A few of my happy places are memories of listening to music, much too loud, in the car. Dancing barefoot in the rose garden, peasant skirts damp with dew, or from playing in the fountain. I was listening to Spotify the other day, and Caterpillar Girl came on, and I smiled. She flickers, and she’s beautiful, she glows inside my head, and she will always be my Caterpillar Girl, even now that she is fully a butterfly. Caterpillar Girl lyrics The Cure Flicka flicka flicka Here you are Cata cata cata Caterpillar girl Flowing in And filling up my hopeless heart Oh never never go Dust my lemon lies With powder pink and sweet The day I stop Is the day you change And fly away from me You flicker And you're beautiful You glow inside my head You hold me hypnotized I'm mesmerized Your flames The flames that kiss me dead