Life is made up of choices. Each moment is defined by the choices you make. You have to choose between two things, three things, or an infinite number of things. Each time you make a choice, you choose your life. Sometimes you’re cautious about your decision, weighing each option carefully and thoughtfully against the others. The rest of the time you don’t think at all. You just do. Most of my life has been determined by the latter method of blindly jumping into situations.

People have a name for people like me: “risk-takers”. It’s a nice way of saying “people who don’t think first”. Or if they even bother to think, they ignore it. We risk-takers are a varying breed. For some of us, our risks involve substances and getting that extra high. For others, it’s thrill-seeking in the form of endangering your physical self. Bungee jumping, cliff diving, car racing, unprotected sex. Then for that last section of the risk-taking population, we like to test the boundaries of human relationships. I guess you could say I’m a mix of all three. Somehow I think it boils down to that last one, my true motivation for everything I ever do.

If you do the simple chemistry equation, jumping into decisions plus testing relationships, you can see that my life is merely a highly combustible series of elements leading to one ultimate product: obliteration. It's nothing more than pure and simple self-destruction and an attempt to destroy everything in my path. Luckily for those few people that know this, they aren’t too much like me. But the problem remains that there are really only a small handful of people that know this. I could count them on one hand. And it really only consists of my parents. Even then, I’m not sure they completely understand what they’re dealing with most of the time.

It makes me sad to think about the fact I’m not sure if I’ve ever made a good decision, whether it was thought out or not. It would be easy to blame it on my childhood, my spoiled upbringing. I sailed though most of it, my most important decisions revolving almost exclusively around what shoes match what skirt and how much vodka to mix in with my morning latte. I guess if I wanted to, I could blame this on my parents for never allowing me to contemplate the choices I had. What school would be best? There was no choice. What was I wearing to my coming out? Ignore the fact I didn’t even really get a choice to be a deb at all. None of what I thought mattered. My choices, like everything else in my life, were handed to me. Maybe that’s the reason I still jump into things without thinking. Maybe decision-making and option-balancing are habits and skills I never acquired. Maybe because they are just there, my mind automatically assumes they are right.

I hear people talk. I’m a loose cannon, a teen alcoholic, a bitch, a dumb cheerleader. (Never mind the fact I wouldn’t dream of that much voluntary strenuous physical activity). I OD in TJ. I throw furniture into swimming pools in a manic, unprovoked fit of rage. I call my parents whores and thieves at important social functions. I drag people down with me. I move in with tattooed, bartending lesbians. I shoot to kill.

Maybe that was the defining moment. We all have them right? Maybe that’s what triggered it all. When I shot Trey, I didn’t make a decision because making a decision requires some weighing of choices. Like everything in my life, I, once again, jumped blindly and pulled the trigger.

I didn’t think seriously about what happened until a few weeks after Trey had come out of the hospital. People comforted me saying I did the right thing, that it saved Ryan’s life, that I had no other choice. There are only three people that know better. All of us refuse to discuss it with each other. Summer continues to stand by her Coop, and in turn, so does Seth, bringing the Cohens with him. All this support starts to get suffocating.

But just like everything else in Newport, there are the whispers. These whispers condemn my actions. The people who talk in hushed voices as I walk by silently reprimand me with their cold stares. At first, I consoled myself by saying that they just didn’t understand. They weren’t there. Had they been, they would have done the same as I did.

But as the days passed, the monotony of support faded into a low, ceaseless din all around me. I wished that someone would just scream at me, telling me that what I did was wrong, dangerous, and stupid.

I thought harder about it after Trey left. It wasn’t risk-taking. It was just plain ridiculous. The possible outcomes hadn’t even been a passing thought. I could have hit Ryan. I could have hurt myself. I could have actually killed someone, taken a life. Usually when you fire a gun, that is your intention. Mine had been to save a life. Not Trey’s obviously although I think somehow it may have worked like that on some level by accident. It was a poorly made decision, a spur-of-the-moment action.

Still, no one tells me that. I’ve had to start going to therapy again, coupled with this probation thing that consists of meetings with an officer and journal entries. I hear him whipser to my mother. He throws around words like "high-strung", "volatile", and "depression". But nothing is ever really done about it, just like everything else in my life. It’s amazing what being the late Caleb Nichol’s stepdaughter and Sandy Cohen’s client can do. I faced hardly any consequences. Even my mother, newly reunited with my father mere hours after Caleb’s funeral, was surprisingly calm about the situation.

I don’t think anything I do surprises her anymore. I’ve pretty much exhausted the arsenal of delinquent, teenage behaviour. I could write a book at this stage. I could tell her whole attitude changed with my adventures with Alex. It became apparent that she accepted things as they came, reassuring herself that whatever it was, it’s just a phase.

Isn’t that what she called Alex? Just a fling. Thinking of my ex-girlfriend brings knots to my stomach, much like thoughts of Ryan used to do. I feel regretful when I think of how things had gone and wished I had done things differently. I feel ashamed that for the longest time I had refused to acknowledge how much she really meant to me. For the months following our break-up, her leaving, she wasn’t an ex-girlfriend. She was just a friend that I hung out with for a while. She was a niche in my totem pole of fair-weather friends. She wasn’t the same person that I lived with, that I woke up next to every morning. She had been the first, and so far only, person I had woken up beside, naked, on a regular basis. But still, she was just a friend. And that bothers me now when I reflect on what I thought about her. It wasn’t so much that I referred to Alex as a friend to others but that even in my head, she was nothing more than that. Holly had been just a friend too. It wasn’t exactly an esteemed position.

Ryan was never a friend, no matter how hard we tried. He was an outsider, then a mystery, then a way to piss off my mother, then a boyfriend and the cycle goes on. He is a boyfriend again. It’s nice. A normal, safe option that my mom didn’t completely loathe this time around, especially since he apparently "saved" me from a far worse situation.

D.J. Oliver. They had faded from memory almost as quickly as they appeared. Luke occasionally popped up as a fond memory, but mostly as a cautionary tale. Ryan faded in and out, as did Alex. I can’t help it with her. I learnt a lot from her, as stupid as that sounds. And I think I would have kept learning but I fucked us over by my special brand of emotional risk-taking again.

I think it’s true about your first love. They are the one person that you will always feel something for. Ryan is that person for me. And part of you leaves when they do, whether it’s to Chino, to L.A., to Portland, or to Maui. Maybe wanting him back so badly wasn’t so much a desire for him but for that part of myself that I lost. I had left behind so many things, destroyed some many others and had the rest of them stolen from me. Maybe he was a last attempt to reclaim myself.

Whatever was so wonderful about the first time around isn’t so wonderful twice.

It isn’t a rekindling of first love. We’re different people now. He’s grown without me. I’ve grown, or at least I try to pretend I have in order to keep up with him. I’m not sure he really loves me either. We’re together. That’s what is expected. We’re both missing something. We won’t ever be that for each but its okay to pretend for now even if neither of us is really happy.

It’s most obvious when we’re alone together. Our minds wander and slip into separate fantasises. Who knows what he’s thinking about. I know that most of the time I’m not thinking about him. I feel bad that I don’t feel bad about that. Somehow it seems okay.

Especially since he knows.

He’s known for a while. In my alternate reality, other people take his place. When I close my eyes, I see her. Not all the time, but frequently. I struggle to remember to say his name when I come. Her name is buried deep inside me. When he goes down on me it’s even worse. Thoughts of her bombard my senses and her touch floods my veins. If it wasn’t so obvious why, I would slap myself out of that daydream. But it is obvious.

Would he even care?

I remember when I let it slip one night. His tongue lapped lazy circles at my core. I had moaned her name. It wasn’t loud, just barely a whisper. He had frozen for a moment and in response my body tensed with regret. After an awkward pause, he resumed his actions. I never apologized and he never mentioned it, not even as a joke.

We ignore it as though it never happened, knowing full well it did and things will never be normal again. I can tell he’s always anticipating that one word now and I can’t tell if he wants to hear it again. It’s almost like he does, as if it was some kind of strange compliment. Surely no one is better at eating a girl out than another girl, right? I feel like taking that risk and calling her name instead of repressing it as it is now, only existing as a constant chant in my mind.

It isn’t just during sex that I think of her. Lately I’ve taken to walking the beach. Even despite memories of Trey, I feel good with the sand between my toes as I listen to the waves crash. Even something as simple as watching the water reminds me of her.

She taught me about waves. The science of surfing: the swell, the crest, and the break. Waves, like most other things in life, have patterns. They come in sets and the third wave here is usually the best, well depending on the wind and moon of course, as she said. It takes patience. Too many inexperienced surfers jump on the first wave thinking there won’t be another like it. Too bad they miss out on the best.

I think I did this. The first time she took me out, the first baby wave always looked good and I would attempt to take it, regardless of her urging to hold back, not to jump right in. But that’s just my style. Whether I was ready or not, I would go after the first wave. And fail. I missed the best. I miss the best.

She then sat me down on the beach and we watched the sets together. We did that a lot. She felt most comfortable beside the water.

I remember that we were sitting watching the red tide when she admitted that watching the tide turn was never a real life ritual of hers, just a well-conceived metaphor and a tricky excuse to make herself less nervous around me. She had also admitted during that same conversation that she had been planning, for sometime before that night, how and when to kiss me. I remember the look in her eyes, this strange mix of shyness and adoration when she asked if I wanted to go home now. The night she confessed was the first time I was ever with another girl so completely.

Somehow I’m here, driving myself slowly insane, listening to the crashing, leading a life that has been pre-planned and continuing to take risks like always. I still jump on the first wave. Sometimes we don’t learn.

They say every time you love someone, a piece of your heart goes with them. I can say that a big chunk of mine went with her. As with Ryan, I don’t know if seeing her again would repair it, fill in the hole that was left there. In my happy world it would but experience says otherwise. In fact, it screams at me for being such a lovesick idiot and wishing on stars. But there’s a possibility that maybe one of these random days that I actually get to the beach, she’ll show up thinking like me. She’ll be still as in love with me as when she left. Common sense teams up with experience and rants about reality. That’s a risk I’m willing to take.

So I sit on the beach, bitterly wiping errant tears off my cheeks as I watch waves die on against the shore. I sit wishing that she would come sit beside me again. She would lean against me. We would kiss. I would place my lightly hand on the inside of her thigh as her hand would hold my back. Then we would share some snack, fries or maybe popcorn. She would smile, and say something surprisingly intelligent and insightful about waves, her voice twinkling with excitement. I wouldn’t have to pretend because I really would be happy again.

But now, sitting alone, all I have are her lessons about waves.