Summertime Will Never Be The Same (Without You)

I haven't written anything today, but here is an excerpt from what I was up to yesterday. I will pass the halfway point today!

Brett and Sadie have now been together for about six months. This is especially noteworthy, since no one really thought that they would last at all. To anyone outside of this relationship, it doesn’t make any sense. Sadie is passionate, loving, and always overzealous. She moves through the world like a Guido through a small door; everything affects her and hurts her. Brett, on the other hand, moves through the world like a hot dog down a hallway. Or, for an analogy that isn’t so weird and disgusting, he travels through life like a crowd surfer at an LFO concert; helped by others, and set to amazing music (at Jackie’s Place).

Brett once remarked to Sadie that he doesn’t understand how she can be so encumbered by the world around her, or how she can be so upset about things that he believes do not affect her. Sadie feels too much, he has always thought. The ways in which she is so profoundly affected by everything are puzzling to him. But then again, with everything we know about Brett, how could be comprehend this? Feeling is actively discouraged in his family; talking about things that are important is as foreign of a concept to the Hall family as not being hot is to four out of five of the members of New Kids on the Block. It is easier to passively accept the world as it is, to move through it like a hot dog in a hallway, than to be hurt. For Brett, feeling nothing is better than feeling anything bad.

But everything looks different from far away, and there are many reasons that Sadie and Brett have lasted for as long as they have. To know more about this, we have to look to the past.

During Brett’s first year at Harvard, he lived in Adams House that faced into the Hah-vah-d Yah-d. It was in Adams House that he met Anne Adams. No, Anne isn’t an heir to the John Adams name, the first vice-president and future president of the United States, but she might as well have been. Her family is almost as famous—her father’s family owns a shipping company, and one of her cousins is an heiress socialite who is most famous for her sex tape with Sean Avery and Scott Hartnell. Sean Avery then went to the press and made a comment that was insulting to every single minority group, for no reason at all. But it’s Sean Avery, so what do you expect? No one purchased the sex tape, however, because Scott Hartnell is disgustingly hideous and unpleasant to lay eyes on. This is the main reason that Anne’s cousin is famous, since America doesn’t care about hockey. It shows every time they go to the Olympics.

If you need to know one thing about Anne, well, it’s that there really isn’t anything to know about Anne. Sure, she’s beautiful; all that she needs to cause men to turn their heads and stare is a little mascara, maybe some blusher or bronzer. Her hair is blonde and the perfect messy-wavy that people could spend hours on their own trying to achieve, but never really do. She is a Harvard history major, a bastion of boring and insufferable a-holes if there ever was one, apart from the department of social and political thought at York University. And no, she isn’t particularly passionate about history. The past probably appeals to her because her present is so pointless. Everyone knows that she will never work a day in her life; going to college at Harvard isn’t a privilege for her, it’s a right. It’s mostly a place where she will meet a rich husband, or even a not-so-rich husband, since she is rich enough for the entire town of Cambridge.

Now, it needs to be said that there is nothing bad that most people could say about Anne. She is pleasant, pretty, and pragmatic. She doesn’t hold a lot of opinions, but it isn’t really a problem because everyone around her always thinks for her. She is never really angry about anything, or sad about anything else. She is just Anne. If she were a colour, she would be beige. But a pretty beige, one that boring people could base their entire home décor around.

You may be thinking that Anne and Brett would be a perfect match; they could stare at each other and admire their mutual beauty while never fighting or disagreeing. Disagreements are for people who feel strongly about something, which neither of them do.

The problem with this romance that would be fit for an Abercrombie and Fitch ad (Brett and his friends like to walk around shirtless with padding in their crotches, Anne looks emaciated, bored and gormless, and there is no colour in their relationship) is that they are both so perfectly plain in every aspect of their lives other than their physical appearances that they both eventually became too tired of each other. There never really was anything to say. The initial attraction that was essentially fuelled by mutual attractiveness soon faded into mundaneness. They never confided in one another; why would you tell someone anything if they aren’t really human enough to understand or care? She ultimately cheated on him with another equally boring guy, and Brett barely had the heart to care. They both knew in their minds that they had never really meant anything to one another.

They were simply placeholders; someone to be there on Friday nights when you need a date, and someone to kiss goodnight. But as placeholders, they were interchangeable. Almost anyone else could have filled the same role in their lives, but Sadie does it better.