Feb 6 - Mellifluous in Posso's Prompts

Mellifluous (adj:) (of a voice or words) sweet or musical; pleasant to hear.

In high school, I went to a summer camp of sorts, designed for kids from low income homes to get out, experience college campuses and basically be tricked into summer school for six weeks with the inclination that you’d get to take a paid trip to somewhere fucking cool in the dead heat of summer! Yeah! Let’s let little Posso be in control of another yearbook and do fuck all for work, pretend like he can procrastinate his way through a college level English class because he wrote one phenomenal paper on Crime and Punishment and binge drink soda and eat cookies while signaling all the hot girls at basketball camp with laser pointers! FUCK YES HIGH SCHOOL.

Gina was a super nice, very timid girl who seemed to take interest in a lot of things I did. (I was 17, I didn’t get that a girl would actually have a crush on my dumb ass) Looking back at it now, she was around for a lot of the stuff I did; on the sidelines while I shuffled my fat into kids on the basketball court, taking pictures of me while I was taking pictures of birdshit on cars, moving up in line to take the lifesaver off of my toothpick in our summer camp games, I was as dull as the grayest crayon in the jumbo box. After our school and activities were concluded, we were all set to spend a week on a coach bus to Boston. I was hella excited: I had wanted to go to Boston College to play hockey and maybe get an education. (Parents knew about school but didn’t know about my walk on dreams) Super excited to get that phony fucking accent and to totally leave Wisconsin and all the shitbirds that I couldn’t stand behind.

To be honest, this was twenty years ago, and I had a fucking push button camera that I never developed the film from so I don’t remember everything we did on this trip, but I will never ever forget the first time I ever saw a whale in an ocean. Getting no sleep the night before after prank calling all the hotel rooms asking if size really mattered (see, no change here,) we were up bright and early to make our way to Plymouth Rock (worst part I remember, it’s a fucking rock. woo hoo.) and then eventually to our charter boat to whale watch. All the counselors were weary; advising most of the kids to take or at least have some dramamine on hand in case seasickness became a factor. Me? Shit no, I was fucking ready to get close enough to a whale to get wet. I was riding that seventeen year old high: I was grabbing this girls boobies that I was kind of seeing at the time (but not serious, cause we lived in different towns and I didn’t have a drivers license at the time) and I was all set to scream “Free Willy!” when that lard of a humpback breached.

Getting on the boat was a trip. No less than a dozen kids were already hanging over railings barfing into the Atlantic, some were curled up into balls on the benches of the boat, me? Not me, I was at the bow of the boat reenacting the only scene I knew from word of mouth about the Titanic; screaming ‘I’m on top of the world!’ with outstretched arms. I started to come down from the eight can Jolt sugar high I had been on and started to look around to see who I knew that hadn’t been stricken down by motion sickness. Sitting alone, on a bench, with her head in between her knees, was Gina. I ran over and sat down next to her.
“You don’t look like you’re having much fun yet.” I said, still spazing out about being on an ocean.
“I’m just a little scared, I don’t feel good, and I just really want to see a whale.” muttered Gina as she was clearly holding in a gag.
Compelled that someone actually wanted to see a whale with me, I started rubbing her back softly, telling her that she was going to be okay and that we were going to see a mother flippin whale. Gina and I sat there and talked about Spooner, Siren, (Wisconsin hometowns) summer school, actual school, what kind of music we were listening to and pretty much all things life on that day trip. We saw a group of whales and I’ll always remember she grabbed my hand and told me how much it meant to her that she got to see this in person. On the trip back to shore, we sat and I pulled out my Discman (hell yeah burned CDs) and she knew one of the songs I had been turning it up and ripping the knob off to was “Bleed American” by Jimmy Eat World. She pulled out the actual CD of Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World and said, “This is one of my favorite CDs, can we listen to my favorite song?” The song was called “Hear You Me.” I’ll never forget it. I think we listened to it on repeat for a half hour and just held hands until one of our counselors barked at us for no PDAs, in between her puking.

Gina and I went our separate ways after that. She wrote me probably one of the most beautiful notes thanking me and telling me how much that moment meant to her summer. I, like the pig headed maturing child I was, took it as ‘meh’ and went on with my life. She had asked me out the next summer but by that time I had been infatuated with another girl from another bordering town of Spooner (I learned from a young age that if I hid my girlfriends I couldn’t get judged, and clearly that habit hasn’t died either) and she had horses! And she liked me and was prettier than any girl that had ever talked to me at the time! Gina made one last attempt though, and she left me a CD she complied that had songs that reminded her of me, and of course on it, was Jimmy Eat World’s “Hear You Me.” It was a lost cause though. I buffooned my way through teen flings and neglected what I think was the first girl that ever loved me. It’s sobering now though, whenever I hear that song I can picture Gina’s face clearly and sometimes I think ‘well, I could just search her out on Facebook,’ but then there’s always that shame filled part of me that says, ‘why bother, you did it to yourself.’ No matter what though, I still haven’t forgotten Gina, the first whale I ever saw on the first ocean I’d ever been in, and I still own the Boston College shirt she bought me in a Champs on that trip over 16 years ago.

But to take a line from that song;

I never said thank you for that, I thought I might get one more chance.