Post by skellig on Jun 29, 2005 1:49:46 GMT -5
“I spend 23 hours a day thinking about how we’re wrong for each other, and I realize that in the 24th hour, she’s been on my mind all day.” (Carter, “ER”)
It’s 3 am, and as tempting as it is to say the contrary, the song I have in my head is not “3 am” (Busted) but more “Forever begins” (The 411). From the outside of my bedroom window, I can just make out the lights of London city. The rain outside creates something which, if I were to be poetic, could almost be considered as a rhythm. Disconnected notes maybe, almost even random, but a rhythm none-the-less. It’s poetic in its own right.
But the reason I can’t sleep isn’t because I’m admiring the peacefulness of London at night. There’s something that’s been bothering me for a while, but it’s only now –almost a month later- that I’m finally beginning to ‘confront’, for lack of a better term, the issue. I admit that at the time, I wasn’t really concerned about this girl’s problem. It didn’t concern me (directly or indirectly), it wasn’t my fault (I wasn’t even THERE at the time), and besides, what did she expect me to do anyway? So I stayed silent. But as time went by, the words which at first hadn’t bothered me at all began to creep into my unconsciousness more and more.
“It’s not like I don’t want to post or anything…it’s like now everything is going back to how it was before… I’m just going through a lot right now…”
At the time, I didn’t really think anything of it. So the girl has a flair for the dramatic. Big deal. 95% of all teenagers do. It was nothing important; it was just a fluke, just a random moment of poetic justice, brought on by a combination of frustration and something which could be described as fear.
But then I realized, ah, she was actually serious.
She really was losing her faith in them.
And although it wasn’t really my fault, I wanted to help her. I wanted to remind her why she had been one of their fans since July 2004. Most of all, I wanted her to have something to believe in. Believing in something is important, be it in a person or just a random fact. Religion, God, the best in people, the future, love, anything… If you have something to believe in then you’re halfway to being ok for the rest of your life. It gives you hope. And when you have hope… you can do anything.
Francesca Sandford and Calvin Goldspink. Classic romance or perfect fairytale? Two souls who finally found themselves or two strangers who met by chance? So many questions about their identities. And yet only one person ever asked why they were different. Only one person ever asked what made them so special, so unique, that they could not be compared to any other couple in the world, be they make-believe or real.
No one ever really answered her.
And yet, the answer is almost simple. They are not special. Their story is not that of Anthony and Cleopatra, nor is it that of Romeo and Juliet. It is in no way a classic love-story. Girl met Boy. Boy smiled at Girl. Girl fell for Boy. Boy broke up with Girl. Girl cried over Boy. Hardly the story of the century. And yet it is that the fact it’s so normal, so everyday, that makes their story unique.
Indeed, their story is not that different from a normal teenager’s, and perhaps it is because of that that so many people are drawn to the club FCF (184 members at last count). Although it cannot be confirmed if it was love at first sight, there was a definite attraction between the two when they first met: “I thought he was really cute” “she was really cool”, thus making their chemistry both intense and almost charismatic.
But they were friends first, and therein lay a part of the answer as to why they are different. They were just friends who had landed themselves in what some critics had labeled “Fuller’s latest experiment gone wrong”. As they grew older, they friendship deepened, and the chemistry between them became hardly to deny.
And yet, they still remained “just friends.”
That is another element which makes their relationship so appealing to others. They were friends first, and they were friends for a long time. It wasn’t a flash romance, it wasn’t something that started with a smile and ended with a careless “adios, mi amor”. It was an actual relationship, which grew deeper over time.
However, it is nearly impossible to know precisely when, or even why, one day their friendship became something more. Perhaps Frankie was still bitter and jaded from a previous relationship, which left Calvin asking himself just what he had to do to prove he cared for the brown-eyed brunette. Maybe someone in Frankie’s past had let her down, betrayed her, or perhaps even burned her. There is no way of ever knowing for sure. Whoever he was, and whatever he did, he left it hard for Calvin to show just what the latter was really feeling –after all, Calvin now had to fight demons which existed only in Frankie’s head.
But that is beside the point. What is important here is that they did become more than “just good friends”, their relationship was deeper, more intense than that of a “brother/sister relationship.”
Suddenly they were forced to pretend they were not in a relationship. If before their friendship had come naturally to them, faking it, pretending they were, indeed just friends, was now both awkward and unnatural.
The true reason as to why they kept their relationship private can never really be known. Perhaps 19 Management prohibited it on the grounds it could ruin the band’s image, or maybe Simon Fuller was concerned that taking the “pin-up girl” and “resident heart-throb” off the dating market would have consequences on the sales. Or maybe it was Calvin and Frankie’s own decision to keep their relationship out of the public eye. They were, after all, the ones in the relationship, not the outside world.
That raises an important question. Why does everyone take such an interest in their romantic lives? If they’re in love, it should be about them. The world should merely be spectators, followers who remain at a distance, not becoming involved and dictating if a smile is just a little too bright or if a touch lasts for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.
And so they denied their relationship, claiming that “I don’t have a boyfriend” or “I’m not seeing anyone at the moment.”
They kept their relationship quiet. For a while, it worked. They had, indeed, been “just friends” before, and there wasn’t a particular reason as to why they shouldn’t be now. And yet, little things began to give them away. Like a racing heart beat when all he had done was hold her hand (Sky One Mix- It’s A Girl Thing). Like a stare just because he said she was the only one (‘Dreaming’ performance, Xchange).
Indeed, it was their perfect control which gave them away in the end. They had always been careful not to stare for too long, not to stand too close together as to avoid any unwanted attention: “But you’re sitting next to each other…” (CBBC interview). By forcing themselves to act naturally, as if they weren’t bothered by someone who was standing too close to someone who was THEIRS, they had given themselves away. Their control was, as stated previously, too perfect. It was rehearsed, and so it was flawless, but above all, it was unnatural.
So, in response to the question “what makes them so special?”, here is a possible answer: they are not special because of who they are, they are special because of who they are not. They are not Anthony and Cleopatra. They are not Romeo and Juliet.
They are simply themselves.
There’s an old song I used to listen to when I was in LA. Now, though, I forget who did it. Or even the name of the song. But there’s one line which has stuck in my head: “even angels have to fall from grace”. It took me a while to understand that “falling from grace” actually meant “falling in love”. Now, though, I get why that artist used that particular metaphor. Falling in love, it’s like you’re suddenly plummeting down a cliff at 200 miles per hour.
It’s when you’re falling in love that you understand the full concept of gravity.
Gravity is, after all, something we seldom think about. It’s just there. It keeps out feet on the ground. It keeps us from flying into the sky and suffocating into thin air. It’s a godsend. It’s a curse. Because of gravity, we will never know how it is to truly fly. To truly rise into the clouds.
Because of gravity, all we have is the fall.
And we always fall.
Because no matter how high we go, we must come down.
Gravity, it affects us all. It doesn’t matter who you are. What you’ve done. Who you failed to become. Gravity doesn’t care. It simply pulls. It pulls at us with unrelenting force. Unrelenting greed. It doesn’t matter that we don’t want to fall. That we try desperately to hang onto whatever we can to stop the pull. Gravity doesn’t care. It just pulls and pulls and pulls.
And eventually, it wins. Gravity always wins in the end. No matter how hard we fight it, gravity always wins.
It’s just the way it is.
“I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” He tells her. For a moment, neither of them speak. The silence between them is almost too loud, too out of place considering what he just said.
“Ok,” she says. He looks at her, almost as if he is waiting for her to say something else. Surely their relationship deserved something more than just a simple “ok”.
Yet she stays silent.
If he had looked back before he left the room, he would have seen her tears.
She is hurt, frustrated, angry, upset. But most of all, she’s disappointed. Yet she supposes she should have expected it. She had believed in them. A foolish mistake on her part, really. She should have known better than to believe in something which could be broken by words as simple as ‘I don’t think we should see each other anymore’.
She’s good at pretending. She should be. She has been doing nothing but that for the past four years. Pretending she isn’t heartbroken, pretending she doesn’t care, pretending she’s over him, it’s all simple really. It’s just a matter of coordinating breathing and smiling.
She’ll deny it to anyone who asks, but there are times when she regrets ever having gone to the auditions. If she hadn’t gone, then she wouldn’t have seen him. And if she had never met him, then she never would have fallen in love with his smile.
It doesn’t matter that when he smiles, she automatically smiles too. The cynical part of her wants to forget those kinds of details.
She tries to deny her true feelings by getting another boyfriend: “Probably my boyfriend” “my boyfriend’s fantastic” “he’s gorgeous”. And for a while, it works. It really does. The betrayal stops burning, and her heart doesn’t really break with every breath.
And if no one is to mention the uncanny resemblance between her current boyfriend and the thief who comes every night to steal her friends, then she won’t either.
Seeing her with her new boyfriend reminds him just how unattainable she really is.
It’s hard, he realizes. And that surprises him. He never would have thought that pretending not to be jealous is actually harder than pretending not to be in a relationship.
But then, he should have known someone like her would get over someone like him.
She’s gorgeous, she’s sweet, she’s talented, she’s the perfect girl really. He knows that’s why he broke up with her- she’s perfect, and he’s not. She’ll always be that girl, the one admired from afar and yet always unattainable. She’s perfect and therefore she deserves someone perfect, and he’s just a normal guy. He doesn’t have anything special to offer her, expect maybe his heart. She deserves the world.
Try as he can, he could never give her that.
The Tiffany’s necklace will never be enough for her. He would have to buy her a hundred, no, a thousand other necklaces just so she’ll understand she’s the only one for him.
She is, in every sense of the term, “the one”. But by the time he realized that, she had found someone else.
When he looks at her, he is reminded of one of those mythical Greek Gods he used to read about when he was younger, immortal and gorgeous and forever out of reach.
He supposes, in that sense, that he can’t really blame her for getting over him. Everything would be so much simpler if he could just walk away from her, be it in real life or just in his dreams. If only he isn’t constantly haunted by her smile, a smile that used to be for him but is now for a guy who probably doesn’t get just how special she really is.
Calvin, however, does get it.
He knows her favorite color: “pink”, her favorite movie: “Grease”, her favorite food: “Chinese”. He knows the little things, he knows the implicit things. He knows them because he knows her.
He knows her better than her boyfriend ever will.
He also knows he’ll have to wait forever for her to understand he’s the one she really wants (“What does Frankie dream about? Me, of course.”) But she has a boyfriend, and no matter how badly he wants her, he will never ask her to leave her boyfriend for him. It would have to be her own choice. And he would, still, move Heaven and Earth for her to choose him.
Not that she ever will.
After all, she’s over him. It’s not like she still dreams of him.
There’s a thunderstorm outside, and either because of lack of sleep or because I still have “Forever Begins” in my head, I think back to the Spiderman prophecies.
Ironically, it really did start out as a joke in part 18. Gero, Kerry, Angel, Michele, and me. We were bored. We were killing time. It was nothing serious- “Good Lord, it sounds like something out of a really bad comic strip.” That comment, meant as a joke, prompted Michele to claim that FCF was actually “Spiderman 3”, that Francesca Sandford was the real life Mary Jane Watson and that Peter Parker’s true identity was Calvin Goldspink. Michele also compared FCF to ‘The O.C.’
It was a joke. It didn’t mean anything.
But ‘The O.C.’ aired that night.
And then the impossible, the unthinkable happened. What was so shocking, so surprising, that it left the ones involved completely speechless.
Spiderman references. An argument. Rain. Upside-down kiss. Fate.
If we joked about it, it happened.
It wasn’t as if we had predicted it. We had joked about it, that’s all. It was a joke. Just a way to pass the time. We didn’t mean for it to come true.
It just did.
If I were to be poetic, if I were to be romantic, if I were to be dramatic, I would say that FCF changed my life.
But I’m none of the above. FCF didn’t change my life. However, it did, in some ways, influence me, and it did open up my eyes and allow me to meet people I never would have known otherwise, and for that I am grateful.
It is only recently that I actually got the idea to transform this into a so-called “essay”. I remember someone (could have been Michele, not sure though) saying that FCF was the only club whose members could write entire essays on a moment. At the time, I thought it was a joke. Surely she didn’t mean something like that. Besides, it’ll be almost impossible to pull it off.
Then the person in question lost her faith.
I had posted an essay on my LJ, and Claire had said something along the lines of how I was “just showing off”.
I thought of the person, then I thought of the essay. And I wondered ‘what if someone really did write an entire essay on Frankie and Calvin?’
It would be original.
It would be creative.
It would totally pis.s FAF off.
Oh yeah. I was totally going to do it.
I’m coming to the end of the essay. Outside the rain is still present, yet it’s softer, almost even peaceful. I guess all that’s left is to conclude the essay on Francesca Sandford and Calvin Goldspink. Yet, I don’t think anyone can really “conclude” their story. An old picture of the band might resurface, and in the background you notice Frankie and Calvin are holding hands. Or maybe the girl Calvin sings about in his songs has a striking similarity to a certain brown-eyed brunette. Or maybe Frankie might ask Calvin to star in her new video.
One will never know, and that part of the reason one shouldn’t really give up on FCF. Although the club may not change someone life, it could just help them. If you think of all the friends you’ve made in FCF, all the good times you’ve had with them, all the times they’ve been there if you ever needed a shoulder to cry on or just someone to talk to… then walking away from that would be almost foolish.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The references to “Anthony and Cleopatra” and “Romeo and Juliet” are taken from the plays written by William Shakespeare.
The passage “The true reason […] longer than necessary” is inspired by something Claire wrote a while ago.
The “perfect control” passage is based on a “Without A Trace” fanfiction I read a while ago, but have forgotten the title. In any case, the line “it was rehearsed…” had originally been written by someone else.
The main quotes about gravity are taken from the ER fanfiction entitled “Gravity”.
“I don’t think we should see each other anymore” is the opening passage from the ER fanfiction “Scarlet Nail Polish”. What, did you really think Calvin could be that poetic on his own?
The passage “she tried to hide…” is, once again, inspired by what Claire wrote.
“Her heart doesn’t really break with every breath” is a line taken from the S Club 8 fanfiction “Stolen”.
The “uncanny resemblance” is based on what ‘starbucksineedu' told me. I do not know if Calvin really does look like Frankie’s current boyfriend. I do not know if Calvin even dated Frankie. It just suited me that way. Besides, it sounded poetic.
The reference to “a guy who probably doesn’t even get just how special she really is” is, indeed, taken from the S Club 8 fanfiction “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”.
It’s 3 am, and as tempting as it is to say the contrary, the song I have in my head is not “3 am” (Busted) but more “Forever begins” (The 411). From the outside of my bedroom window, I can just make out the lights of London city. The rain outside creates something which, if I were to be poetic, could almost be considered as a rhythm. Disconnected notes maybe, almost even random, but a rhythm none-the-less. It’s poetic in its own right.
But the reason I can’t sleep isn’t because I’m admiring the peacefulness of London at night. There’s something that’s been bothering me for a while, but it’s only now –almost a month later- that I’m finally beginning to ‘confront’, for lack of a better term, the issue. I admit that at the time, I wasn’t really concerned about this girl’s problem. It didn’t concern me (directly or indirectly), it wasn’t my fault (I wasn’t even THERE at the time), and besides, what did she expect me to do anyway? So I stayed silent. But as time went by, the words which at first hadn’t bothered me at all began to creep into my unconsciousness more and more.
“It’s not like I don’t want to post or anything…it’s like now everything is going back to how it was before… I’m just going through a lot right now…”
At the time, I didn’t really think anything of it. So the girl has a flair for the dramatic. Big deal. 95% of all teenagers do. It was nothing important; it was just a fluke, just a random moment of poetic justice, brought on by a combination of frustration and something which could be described as fear.
But then I realized, ah, she was actually serious.
She really was losing her faith in them.
And although it wasn’t really my fault, I wanted to help her. I wanted to remind her why she had been one of their fans since July 2004. Most of all, I wanted her to have something to believe in. Believing in something is important, be it in a person or just a random fact. Religion, God, the best in people, the future, love, anything… If you have something to believe in then you’re halfway to being ok for the rest of your life. It gives you hope. And when you have hope… you can do anything.
Francesca Sandford and Calvin Goldspink. Classic romance or perfect fairytale? Two souls who finally found themselves or two strangers who met by chance? So many questions about their identities. And yet only one person ever asked why they were different. Only one person ever asked what made them so special, so unique, that they could not be compared to any other couple in the world, be they make-believe or real.
No one ever really answered her.
And yet, the answer is almost simple. They are not special. Their story is not that of Anthony and Cleopatra, nor is it that of Romeo and Juliet. It is in no way a classic love-story. Girl met Boy. Boy smiled at Girl. Girl fell for Boy. Boy broke up with Girl. Girl cried over Boy. Hardly the story of the century. And yet it is that the fact it’s so normal, so everyday, that makes their story unique.
Indeed, their story is not that different from a normal teenager’s, and perhaps it is because of that that so many people are drawn to the club FCF (184 members at last count). Although it cannot be confirmed if it was love at first sight, there was a definite attraction between the two when they first met: “I thought he was really cute” “she was really cool”, thus making their chemistry both intense and almost charismatic.
But they were friends first, and therein lay a part of the answer as to why they are different. They were just friends who had landed themselves in what some critics had labeled “Fuller’s latest experiment gone wrong”. As they grew older, they friendship deepened, and the chemistry between them became hardly to deny.
And yet, they still remained “just friends.”
That is another element which makes their relationship so appealing to others. They were friends first, and they were friends for a long time. It wasn’t a flash romance, it wasn’t something that started with a smile and ended with a careless “adios, mi amor”. It was an actual relationship, which grew deeper over time.
However, it is nearly impossible to know precisely when, or even why, one day their friendship became something more. Perhaps Frankie was still bitter and jaded from a previous relationship, which left Calvin asking himself just what he had to do to prove he cared for the brown-eyed brunette. Maybe someone in Frankie’s past had let her down, betrayed her, or perhaps even burned her. There is no way of ever knowing for sure. Whoever he was, and whatever he did, he left it hard for Calvin to show just what the latter was really feeling –after all, Calvin now had to fight demons which existed only in Frankie’s head.
But that is beside the point. What is important here is that they did become more than “just good friends”, their relationship was deeper, more intense than that of a “brother/sister relationship.”
Suddenly they were forced to pretend they were not in a relationship. If before their friendship had come naturally to them, faking it, pretending they were, indeed just friends, was now both awkward and unnatural.
The true reason as to why they kept their relationship private can never really be known. Perhaps 19 Management prohibited it on the grounds it could ruin the band’s image, or maybe Simon Fuller was concerned that taking the “pin-up girl” and “resident heart-throb” off the dating market would have consequences on the sales. Or maybe it was Calvin and Frankie’s own decision to keep their relationship out of the public eye. They were, after all, the ones in the relationship, not the outside world.
That raises an important question. Why does everyone take such an interest in their romantic lives? If they’re in love, it should be about them. The world should merely be spectators, followers who remain at a distance, not becoming involved and dictating if a smile is just a little too bright or if a touch lasts for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.
And so they denied their relationship, claiming that “I don’t have a boyfriend” or “I’m not seeing anyone at the moment.”
They kept their relationship quiet. For a while, it worked. They had, indeed, been “just friends” before, and there wasn’t a particular reason as to why they shouldn’t be now. And yet, little things began to give them away. Like a racing heart beat when all he had done was hold her hand (Sky One Mix- It’s A Girl Thing). Like a stare just because he said she was the only one (‘Dreaming’ performance, Xchange).
Indeed, it was their perfect control which gave them away in the end. They had always been careful not to stare for too long, not to stand too close together as to avoid any unwanted attention: “But you’re sitting next to each other…” (CBBC interview). By forcing themselves to act naturally, as if they weren’t bothered by someone who was standing too close to someone who was THEIRS, they had given themselves away. Their control was, as stated previously, too perfect. It was rehearsed, and so it was flawless, but above all, it was unnatural.
So, in response to the question “what makes them so special?”, here is a possible answer: they are not special because of who they are, they are special because of who they are not. They are not Anthony and Cleopatra. They are not Romeo and Juliet.
They are simply themselves.
There’s an old song I used to listen to when I was in LA. Now, though, I forget who did it. Or even the name of the song. But there’s one line which has stuck in my head: “even angels have to fall from grace”. It took me a while to understand that “falling from grace” actually meant “falling in love”. Now, though, I get why that artist used that particular metaphor. Falling in love, it’s like you’re suddenly plummeting down a cliff at 200 miles per hour.
It’s when you’re falling in love that you understand the full concept of gravity.
Gravity is, after all, something we seldom think about. It’s just there. It keeps out feet on the ground. It keeps us from flying into the sky and suffocating into thin air. It’s a godsend. It’s a curse. Because of gravity, we will never know how it is to truly fly. To truly rise into the clouds.
Because of gravity, all we have is the fall.
And we always fall.
Because no matter how high we go, we must come down.
Gravity, it affects us all. It doesn’t matter who you are. What you’ve done. Who you failed to become. Gravity doesn’t care. It simply pulls. It pulls at us with unrelenting force. Unrelenting greed. It doesn’t matter that we don’t want to fall. That we try desperately to hang onto whatever we can to stop the pull. Gravity doesn’t care. It just pulls and pulls and pulls.
And eventually, it wins. Gravity always wins in the end. No matter how hard we fight it, gravity always wins.
It’s just the way it is.
“I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” He tells her. For a moment, neither of them speak. The silence between them is almost too loud, too out of place considering what he just said.
“Ok,” she says. He looks at her, almost as if he is waiting for her to say something else. Surely their relationship deserved something more than just a simple “ok”.
Yet she stays silent.
If he had looked back before he left the room, he would have seen her tears.
She is hurt, frustrated, angry, upset. But most of all, she’s disappointed. Yet she supposes she should have expected it. She had believed in them. A foolish mistake on her part, really. She should have known better than to believe in something which could be broken by words as simple as ‘I don’t think we should see each other anymore’.
She’s good at pretending. She should be. She has been doing nothing but that for the past four years. Pretending she isn’t heartbroken, pretending she doesn’t care, pretending she’s over him, it’s all simple really. It’s just a matter of coordinating breathing and smiling.
She’ll deny it to anyone who asks, but there are times when she regrets ever having gone to the auditions. If she hadn’t gone, then she wouldn’t have seen him. And if she had never met him, then she never would have fallen in love with his smile.
It doesn’t matter that when he smiles, she automatically smiles too. The cynical part of her wants to forget those kinds of details.
She tries to deny her true feelings by getting another boyfriend: “Probably my boyfriend” “my boyfriend’s fantastic” “he’s gorgeous”. And for a while, it works. It really does. The betrayal stops burning, and her heart doesn’t really break with every breath.
And if no one is to mention the uncanny resemblance between her current boyfriend and the thief who comes every night to steal her friends, then she won’t either.
Seeing her with her new boyfriend reminds him just how unattainable she really is.
It’s hard, he realizes. And that surprises him. He never would have thought that pretending not to be jealous is actually harder than pretending not to be in a relationship.
But then, he should have known someone like her would get over someone like him.
She’s gorgeous, she’s sweet, she’s talented, she’s the perfect girl really. He knows that’s why he broke up with her- she’s perfect, and he’s not. She’ll always be that girl, the one admired from afar and yet always unattainable. She’s perfect and therefore she deserves someone perfect, and he’s just a normal guy. He doesn’t have anything special to offer her, expect maybe his heart. She deserves the world.
Try as he can, he could never give her that.
The Tiffany’s necklace will never be enough for her. He would have to buy her a hundred, no, a thousand other necklaces just so she’ll understand she’s the only one for him.
She is, in every sense of the term, “the one”. But by the time he realized that, she had found someone else.
When he looks at her, he is reminded of one of those mythical Greek Gods he used to read about when he was younger, immortal and gorgeous and forever out of reach.
He supposes, in that sense, that he can’t really blame her for getting over him. Everything would be so much simpler if he could just walk away from her, be it in real life or just in his dreams. If only he isn’t constantly haunted by her smile, a smile that used to be for him but is now for a guy who probably doesn’t get just how special she really is.
Calvin, however, does get it.
He knows her favorite color: “pink”, her favorite movie: “Grease”, her favorite food: “Chinese”. He knows the little things, he knows the implicit things. He knows them because he knows her.
He knows her better than her boyfriend ever will.
He also knows he’ll have to wait forever for her to understand he’s the one she really wants (“What does Frankie dream about? Me, of course.”) But she has a boyfriend, and no matter how badly he wants her, he will never ask her to leave her boyfriend for him. It would have to be her own choice. And he would, still, move Heaven and Earth for her to choose him.
Not that she ever will.
After all, she’s over him. It’s not like she still dreams of him.
There’s a thunderstorm outside, and either because of lack of sleep or because I still have “Forever Begins” in my head, I think back to the Spiderman prophecies.
Ironically, it really did start out as a joke in part 18. Gero, Kerry, Angel, Michele, and me. We were bored. We were killing time. It was nothing serious- “Good Lord, it sounds like something out of a really bad comic strip.” That comment, meant as a joke, prompted Michele to claim that FCF was actually “Spiderman 3”, that Francesca Sandford was the real life Mary Jane Watson and that Peter Parker’s true identity was Calvin Goldspink. Michele also compared FCF to ‘The O.C.’
It was a joke. It didn’t mean anything.
But ‘The O.C.’ aired that night.
And then the impossible, the unthinkable happened. What was so shocking, so surprising, that it left the ones involved completely speechless.
Spiderman references. An argument. Rain. Upside-down kiss. Fate.
If we joked about it, it happened.
It wasn’t as if we had predicted it. We had joked about it, that’s all. It was a joke. Just a way to pass the time. We didn’t mean for it to come true.
It just did.
If I were to be poetic, if I were to be romantic, if I were to be dramatic, I would say that FCF changed my life.
But I’m none of the above. FCF didn’t change my life. However, it did, in some ways, influence me, and it did open up my eyes and allow me to meet people I never would have known otherwise, and for that I am grateful.
It is only recently that I actually got the idea to transform this into a so-called “essay”. I remember someone (could have been Michele, not sure though) saying that FCF was the only club whose members could write entire essays on a moment. At the time, I thought it was a joke. Surely she didn’t mean something like that. Besides, it’ll be almost impossible to pull it off.
Then the person in question lost her faith.
I had posted an essay on my LJ, and Claire had said something along the lines of how I was “just showing off”.
I thought of the person, then I thought of the essay. And I wondered ‘what if someone really did write an entire essay on Frankie and Calvin?’
It would be original.
It would be creative.
It would totally pis.s FAF off.
Oh yeah. I was totally going to do it.
I’m coming to the end of the essay. Outside the rain is still present, yet it’s softer, almost even peaceful. I guess all that’s left is to conclude the essay on Francesca Sandford and Calvin Goldspink. Yet, I don’t think anyone can really “conclude” their story. An old picture of the band might resurface, and in the background you notice Frankie and Calvin are holding hands. Or maybe the girl Calvin sings about in his songs has a striking similarity to a certain brown-eyed brunette. Or maybe Frankie might ask Calvin to star in her new video.
One will never know, and that part of the reason one shouldn’t really give up on FCF. Although the club may not change someone life, it could just help them. If you think of all the friends you’ve made in FCF, all the good times you’ve had with them, all the times they’ve been there if you ever needed a shoulder to cry on or just someone to talk to… then walking away from that would be almost foolish.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The references to “Anthony and Cleopatra” and “Romeo and Juliet” are taken from the plays written by William Shakespeare.
The passage “The true reason […] longer than necessary” is inspired by something Claire wrote a while ago.
The “perfect control” passage is based on a “Without A Trace” fanfiction I read a while ago, but have forgotten the title. In any case, the line “it was rehearsed…” had originally been written by someone else.
The main quotes about gravity are taken from the ER fanfiction entitled “Gravity”.
“I don’t think we should see each other anymore” is the opening passage from the ER fanfiction “Scarlet Nail Polish”. What, did you really think Calvin could be that poetic on his own?
The passage “she tried to hide…” is, once again, inspired by what Claire wrote.
“Her heart doesn’t really break with every breath” is a line taken from the S Club 8 fanfiction “Stolen”.
The “uncanny resemblance” is based on what ‘starbucksineedu' told me. I do not know if Calvin really does look like Frankie’s current boyfriend. I do not know if Calvin even dated Frankie. It just suited me that way. Besides, it sounded poetic.
The reference to “a guy who probably doesn’t even get just how special she really is” is, indeed, taken from the S Club 8 fanfiction “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”.
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