I feel the sidewalk rule deep in my chest. As what feeling, I don’t know. Yearning. Hate. Guilt. Jealousy. Shame. Love. I don’t freaking know. I just know I think about it every day as some far-off star.
The sidewalk rule is one of those things most people probably don’t remember learning about, they just remember knowing. But I remember learning about it. Not what age I was or what exactly was happening. I think it was in my house, and I’m sure it was sunny. I think my sister name-dropped it in a conversation once, and I asked what it was. She explained that it was when a boy stands on the outside of the sidewalk. Probably said it was so he could be closer to the street too, but who can be sure?
It’s something you learn more about in eleventh grade, during the Pride and Prejudice unit, where you’re reviewing a list of rules from Regency England so you can understand the social cues of the book better. I remember one of them standing out to me: When a gentleman is walking with a lady, he stands closer to the street to protect her from it. The streets were a dangerous place back then, people said.
In eleventh grade, the sidewalk rule was all I thought about and before we even started the Pride and Prejudice unit. I imagine it’s because it was the first time in my life that I walked on sidewalks with boys on a regular basis.
We called our friend group Kyle and da Boys, a name we came up with that included extensive lore on a bus ride to California for a choir field trip in April of sophomore year. It was Kyle, Carter, Isaac, and me. We became best friends fast. In hindsight, it almost feels the way those things happen when you’re a little kid, how you kind of make a decision to be best friends and then you just are. Not that we hadn’t all known each other already; we, in fact, were already great friends. But as soon as we had a name, it was different. Suddenly it felt like we were taking selfies and hugging and hanging out all the time. On Mondays we would go on adventures, as we very specifically called them.
The adventures were always more or less the same. There was a shopping center down the street from the high school. It had a Smith’s, a Dollar Tree, and a donut shop called Friendly’s that was a local favorite. I’d regret not mentioning that we were incomplete during my junior year of high school. Isaac had moved to Utah over the summer. It was just the three of us on these adventures, but we went on them all the same. A quick walk up Palo Verde Drive, get a treat at Friendly’s or the dollar store, a walk back down to the high school. There were a few deviations from this formula. Once we went to Smith’s to check if I had the right nail polish and lipstick to match my shoes for the homecoming dance, which Isaac was coming down for as my date. We even once went a little further to Little Caesar’s for a pizza. Other than that, they were nearly identical adventures, but every week they still felt interesting. We would even talk about it during the week sometimes, planning ahead. We knew where we would end up, but maybe we needed something particularly weird or specific. This is at least the explanation I have in my mind for going to the dollar store and getting sherbet that we ate out of the carton with a ladle. (I don’t think we could find normal spoons, or maybe we just thought it would be more fun. The teenage mind is a mystery.) The adventures were always vastly important, in all their meaninglessness.
I don’t remember everything we talked about on those adventures, don’t remember everything we did. I remember there was lots of laughter, though. And while it’s not true, surely not, I feel like I remember every second of that sidewalk. Every last inch. That sidewalk felt like magic, and I thought of the sidewalk rule every single time.
I noted even then that I walked on the outside of the sidewalk every time. At the time, it didn’t fill me with resentment, at least not actively, not in a way I would notice. I just found it interesting. (No, really, I really did just find it interesting, not the way people say that when they’re actually quite mad.) It was funny that I was the only girl in the friend group, and I was always closest to the street.
I do remember being the only girl in the friend group as being special. Now that was an active thought I had a time or two. We had other friend groups that included more girls, but Kyle and da Boys was special, and I was why. I liked the way it felt. I am old and mature enough now to name and admit that I liked the way male attention felt. I still do. I even thought, an active thought in my brain multiple times, that being the only girl was fun because it’s not hard to be the prettiest girl in the friend group when you are the only girl in the friend group.
I know it all sounds terribly toxic and pick-me, because it was. The thing that everyone understands about the pick-me is that she is so desperate to be chosen by a man that she acts an absolute fool. What people forget is that the pick-me is absolutely never chosen, and deep down, she knows there must be something wrong with her that she can’t seem to be loved. Everyone hates a pick-me, but she hates herself just as much, if not more. It all only makes her act more foolish, like a self-abusive cycle.
It’s dreadful to remember about myself and how awful I was. But the teenage heart is perpetually broken, violently insecure, and constantly trying to prove herself. She was (I suspect literally) insane for that, but I don’t blame her.
Who even knows what else was going on in my brain at that time? Maybe I thought that was the kind of friendship we had, where we didn’t do stuff like that because it was just so casual or we were so comfortable with each other or I was one of the boys or whatever. But let’s be honest: if one of them had done that to me, if one of them had moved to walk between me and the street, I would have been thrilled. It’s something I feel in me, a knowledge that if a man says he cares about me then I must be cared for accordingly. An understanding that if a man loves me, he will act as such. I will be treated as valuably as they say I am, and this is male specific because it’s the way the world was built. It’s not just a matter of what is ingrained into the culture, but also that the world is generally safer for men, and as such it is their job to care for women. In the back of my mind, even just subconsciously, I knew they were supposed to be doing this and that they were not.
The other truth is I can’t seem to write a story about boys without being in love with one of them, and at sixteen was my first love. I had had crushes before, but I felt the difference then, and I just knew it. Now that was really magic. To love a boy and to be loved by him back, sure of it, to feel him tackle his arms around you as you laughed your way down the street. I’m still not sure I’ve found a way to describe it. But it was beautiful, to be full of the sparkle of a first time being in love, and the circumstance only made me think about the sidewalk rule even more.
I also find it relevant to say that I got hit by a car that year, right in the crosswalk between that magical sidewalk and the school. I was walking alone when it happened, and what can even be done about that sort of thing? But you do the thematically resonant math for yourself.
To say my first love ended treacherously would be accurate. There were times I didn’t think I’d live to tell the tale. I know he did genuinely like me at one point—he told one of our friends, who years later told me. I cling to that knowledge as the only true evidence that I am capable of being loved by a man. But he lost interest in me soon enough as teenage boys do.
Two friends in the friend group fell in love, and so the friend group fell apart. I was not the center of a masculine world anymore, not even the illusion of one. It was sometime after this, I can’t say how many months or even years later, that I would think on our walks down that sidewalk, reflect on what I had observed in the moment, and felt some residual bitterness. Understanding of how I was never quite loved the way I wanted to be. Not by boys. There must be something about me that is utterly unworthy of male respect.
I don’t have much reason to think about the sidewalk rule anymore. But I still remember the way it felt to be with boys who claimed they were my best friends—one who even said he loved me, with his own mouth and for my own ears to hear—and to never be treated with the care I was told a girl was supposed to be treated with.
I often imagine what it will be like the first time the sidewalk rule is applied to me. I wonder who it will be. I wonder if I’ll cry. In my head, every time, I do. The man asks what’s wrong. I say, “No one’s ever done that to me before.” I fear that’s not a particularly accurate scenario. I’m not good at crying in front of men, of making myself vulnerable enough to them for them to know exactly what I’m really thinking and feeling. Not after I have loved them so much and they can’t even care enough about me to switch places on a sidewalk. No, I’m a huge crier, but I will fight with my life to keep the tears in in front of a man.
In my mind I also always stop walking to hug him in gratitude. To be loved so purely and properly.
I like to think I am so evolved compared to my teenage self. But I’m writing this essay instead of getting on with my life, so my heart is obviously still perpetually broken, violently insecure, and constantly trying to prove herself.
A sidewalk is meant to be a great place of love but is instead my greatest reminder of loneliness, of everything I don’t have. Of the lovelessness I feel, even surrounded by friends. As an adult, I’ve walked alone and filled the gap with good music and compliments on my outfits and makeup from strangers. But every now and then my supervisor, whom I’ve been in love with for four years, will say the way our coworker moved to stand between his girlfriend and a visibly intoxicated man in a big city was “like the sidewalk rule,” and I’ll remember everything I don’t have, and I’ll be filled with hate. I get done with a church meeting with a man I love who rejected me, he offers to give me a ride home, and we walk to his car with me on the outside, and I remember what I am not to him. Even my best friend, when he comes to visit me and we hold hands as we walk to the Taco Bell across from my apartment, is on the inside of that sidewalk. Is it that I am a very protective friend myself? When I’m with my girl friends, I certainly have had moments when I’ve consciously chosen the outside of the sidewalk to protect them. Am I placing myself in the appropriate position waiting to be lovingly moved to where I belong, a move that never comes? Who’s to say?
I truly don’t know. I only know what I’m supposed to have and what I do not.
Elizabeth Day is a writer who’s yet to meet a genre she didn’t like. She is a graduate of Southern Utah University with a bachelor’s degree in English education with a creative writing emphasis and double minors in theater and film. Along with publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in many journals and magazines, she is a regular contributor for the Hey! Young Writer blog and is most recognized for her work as a boy band scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Random Poetry, is out now. You can find her on Instagram @itsanadventur.
Featured image by Maarten Deckers on Unsplash.
