I stab it with a knife until it says my name. It gives in after a few botched attempts. After a minute or so, there it is, carved deeply into the skin of your wooden bedside table. “C-R-I-S-S-Y.” Crissy. That’s me.

“So that when we break up, you’ll look at it all the time and feel like shit.” I expect you to laugh. You shrug and turn up the volume on the television.

Hey. I resent that.

This is in your bedroom in July. I’m seventeen and you’re sixteen. You’re just enough younger than me that I can make fun of you for it, but not so young that people know or think I’m a creepy pre-cougar for dating you. I make fun of you for everything: your milk allergy, strangely dainty fingers, and the fact that you got kicked out of the HSPAs for using an iPod and had to take an extra math class in order to pass junior year. But I love you. In the same way that Summer Roberts loves Seth Cohen on The O.C., the show I make you watch for hours on end.

I make you turn off the air conditioner even though it’s ninety-five degrees out, so that we can hear the TV without the background noise. We sweat through the entire first season, taking breaks only to make out or get another bag of chips from your parents’ stash. The latter happens more frequently. I watch TV over your shoulder as we kiss, my eyes wide open.

This is in my bedroom in December. It’s the eve of Christmas Eve and we’re giving each other gifts. I think you’ll give me a hand-written letter — heartfelt, poetic, silly and wonderful all at once. Maybe even a mix tape. We’ll kiss in the snow. In reality, you turn off the TV and tell me to just open my gift. No. You first. Again you refuse. So I tear open a shiny gold-wrapped box with my fingernails. Others would slowly remove the paper, savoring the moment of suspense. Those same people would tell you that they save the wrapping paper so that they can remember that gift, that tiny moment of unknowing and hope, forever. Emotional hoarders. Not me. I rip that thing to shreds just to get to what’s inside. I get to it and I know immediately that I hate it; I hate it so much.

This is in your best friend’s car later that night. He’s my best friend, too, but his intent toward me is different than it is toward you. He likes me. And when tells me he likes me, he draws out the end of the word. Emphasizes the “K.” And I know that I like him, but I’m not sure if I do or don’t more than like him, so I don’t say anything. Except for everything else. I tell him the entire story of our Christmas Eve. When I say it out loud, it’s a re-write. I add some drama. How you refused to open my gift. The way you practically yelled at me when you told me to open mine. The way you looked at me when I sat there, dripping in gold tissue paper. You looked at me as if we’d both done something wrong.

Me and your best friend are parked in the parking lot of the old church on main street where I used to go to pre-school. He smokes a cigarette while I pick off my nail polish. We’re both nervous. Fidgeting. I kiss your best friend in the snow. He tastes like an ashtray. Out of having nowhere else to look but at each other, we both look up at the steeple. Having done something wrong.

This is a year later in your best friend’s car. I’m eighteen and he’s nineteen, old for our grade. Whenever I make fun of him, he finds something worse to say to me, and then eventually it devolves into arguing until I’m saying things that I didn’t even know I thought. I make a joke about his age; he doesn’t think it’s funny. “At least I didn’t practically date two guys at once.”

Hey. I really resent that.

The jokes stop being jokes when there’s no jest anymore. It’s just drama now: plain, simple, and hurtful. I can’t stop. It’s addictive.

You would never indulge me in dramatics. He does. “Mark would never treat me like this,” I spit. I emphasize the “K” in like, just to deliver the line with a little more sincerity, because I know that I only half mean it. It’s true, you wouldn’t, but it’s irrelevant.

“That’s because he never loved you.”

I laugh. And I keep laughing because the line sounds too ridiculous for real life, something re-written for extra emotional depth. And then it’s clear. He and I are acting. I can’t stop watching it, cheesy and awful, like The O.C., but better because it’s mine by design.

This is today, I’m twenty and you’re nineteen and you’re dating one of my best friends. Karma has its way. She would never watch TV over your shoulder while you kiss. I’m cool with it because you’re both happy. But more so because you and I broke up a long time ago, after you gave me a bunch of lace, ties-on-the-sides, crazy embellished, stripper-esque underwear for Christmas and I cried for hours and then made out with your best friend in a church parking lot.

This is today, in a classroom filled with dust. I’m twenty and I’m telling my writing class about you: my ex who always did the right thing but got it wrong by me, who loved me regardless of how many hours of TV I made him watch, whose bedside table I carved my name into with malicious, near sociopathic intent. The class is uncontrollable, guffaws and heavy exhales. It’s not polite laughter; it’s real and unexpected and I revel in it.

Last week I ran into you at a party and my carve job came up. You tell me that whenever you look at it, “C-R-I-S-S-Y,” you just laugh. And then it’s clear: that was the day I wrote my first joke. Suddenly I have an epiphany, a montage of all the times I did something insane just to make it part of my story. I’ve been obsessed with writing the addictive television show that people turn up, shrugging off their crazy girlfriends, ever since.