my handwriting always gives me away
My friend gave me a journal for my birthday. He gave me more than a journal, but for me, the journal was what made us friends. I told him how I had been pasting myself all over a very public place and that I had retreated somewhere quieter, somewhere similarly public but with less traffic, someplace harder to find. He asked me what I keep for myself and I thought about it and realized, well, not as much as I used to.
So he gave me a journal. It was perfect. Seeing that journal, I realized that he knows a lot more about me than I tell him. The entire birthday present was perfect. We had breakfast and I thought that just sitting and being together and talking, finally actually talking to each other rather than performing, I thought that was the gift. And it was. But then he gave me his GPS and a piece of paper with coordinates on it, because he knows about my inexplicable excitement over it. So we went on a hunt. I went on a hunt, while he followed me, happy with his creation, the creation of a much younger, lighter girl than I had been the night before.
It was cold outside, colder than it had been in a long time. It was still before seven and there was no one out, not even the sun. I came to where the GPS told me I should be and found what the paper said, 'where blue meets gold'. It was a playground, with a blue and gold merry go round. I went to the merry go round and spun it and watched it for a minute, then sat on it, then laid on it and watched the sun coming up and watched his legs go by every few seconds. He climbed on and sat there too, and after a few minutes I said Thank you. And he said You're welcome. This is not your present. I said Why not? And he said Listen.
So I listened and I heard a quiet thump, thump, each time we went around. I got off at the next sound and looked under the merry go round and there was an ammunition box. In the box was a book, a pen (and I love pens more than just about anything), a wooden container and a journal. Each of those things was thought out, planned, with me in mind. The book was one that I wanted but had not read because I cannot justify purchasing all of the books I want to read. I had put a hold on it at the library weeks before. Now I had it. I had been telling him, the last few weeks, how old I felt. How the things that I loved seemed frivolous and I felt like I was growing up finally, and how now that it was happening I did not want to do it. I had told him about my favorite passage from any book, ever, which meant more to me in the last few weeks than it ever had before. It is from Alice in Wonderland.
`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' Alice speaks to Cheshire Cat.
`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
`I don't much care where--' said Alice.
`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
And I had been thinking a lot about how I have no idea where it is I want to get to, thus I have no idea which way to take to get there. I don't know what I am supposed to be doing, ever. I don't know what it is I want, or how to get it, or who I am going to be when I realize that I am more than their mother, and that at some point my life has to be about more than damage control and that I am fifteen years older than I realize and I have no idea where the time went. I'd been filling his head with my melancholy for the past month and I didn't really know if he had listened or cared, only that he was there.
In the wooden container was a tiny music box that plays Happy Birthday, and the pen was a silly, silver gel pen. A perfect, glittery magic wand that I did not even know that I wanted until I saw it, but suddenly it was representative of all of those things, all those things that I had not had, years of growing up too fast and sleeping in cars and with strangers and working in junior high and losing it all in a smoky bowl or a blotted, perforated page, and here was this pen. This glittery pen that was so childish and feminine and I have given a dozen of them to my own little girl because they seem to be everything that little girls are, happy and frivolous and impractical and completely perfect, while I write with a Bic Stic because it is cheap.
And there was a journal, and on the cover is Alice in Wonderland, weeks after that conversation. And he has written in the front, 'We present to you the choicest words'. This is something else that means something to me, and he knows it. And it occurs to me that he has given me this journal with the full knowledge that if I am writing in it I am not writing anywhere else, thus he will have no idea what I am writing about. I tell him this and he says I know, but I am not the one trying to find your way.
Stacy tells me that I must know by now that he adores me and I shrug her off, because that's just who he is, how he is, what he does. She laughs at me and tells me that I'm wrong. I think about this for the next two weeks, wondering if Johnny adores me, and if he does, why I do not adore him back. I do, but not in a boy/girl way, but rather in a, I don't know, playground love way. Until his confession last week, the one in which Stacy is correct and I am completely blind.
And I am chewing on this confession, and wondering what to do with it, and warning him that he knows who I am and what I do and why I do it and that I will probably not change for a long, long time. And he says yes, he knows, and the fact that I try to protect him only makes it worse. And I wonder if it's wrong of me to want both more and less than what he offers, to want something halfway, something in which my heart and head and body are in agreement. With this, I think that I am in love with him being in love with me, and that is wrong, wrong. I know it, but when I got home and he was waiting on my porch I didn't care. And this, now, makes everything else seem stupid because this is for real, this is his real heart and I have it, in my pocket, and I don't want it for the reasons I should want it, because I don't want him for the reasons he wants me, and I told him that, and I should be writing this in my journal but I'm not because I don't want to have to rip it out when I read it and see that I appreciate nothing, and that all those things I thought I wanted I do not actually want now that they are right in front of me, and that when presented with what is probably the most genuine affectionate offer that I may ever receive I turned it down because I did not want it, because I do not want him, because I am an imbecile.
So he gave me a journal. It was perfect. Seeing that journal, I realized that he knows a lot more about me than I tell him. The entire birthday present was perfect. We had breakfast and I thought that just sitting and being together and talking, finally actually talking to each other rather than performing, I thought that was the gift. And it was. But then he gave me his GPS and a piece of paper with coordinates on it, because he knows about my inexplicable excitement over it. So we went on a hunt. I went on a hunt, while he followed me, happy with his creation, the creation of a much younger, lighter girl than I had been the night before.
It was cold outside, colder than it had been in a long time. It was still before seven and there was no one out, not even the sun. I came to where the GPS told me I should be and found what the paper said, 'where blue meets gold'. It was a playground, with a blue and gold merry go round. I went to the merry go round and spun it and watched it for a minute, then sat on it, then laid on it and watched the sun coming up and watched his legs go by every few seconds. He climbed on and sat there too, and after a few minutes I said Thank you. And he said You're welcome. This is not your present. I said Why not? And he said Listen.
So I listened and I heard a quiet thump, thump, each time we went around. I got off at the next sound and looked under the merry go round and there was an ammunition box. In the box was a book, a pen (and I love pens more than just about anything), a wooden container and a journal. Each of those things was thought out, planned, with me in mind. The book was one that I wanted but had not read because I cannot justify purchasing all of the books I want to read. I had put a hold on it at the library weeks before. Now I had it. I had been telling him, the last few weeks, how old I felt. How the things that I loved seemed frivolous and I felt like I was growing up finally, and how now that it was happening I did not want to do it. I had told him about my favorite passage from any book, ever, which meant more to me in the last few weeks than it ever had before. It is from Alice in Wonderland.
`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' Alice speaks to Cheshire Cat.
`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
`I don't much care where--' said Alice.
`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
And I had been thinking a lot about how I have no idea where it is I want to get to, thus I have no idea which way to take to get there. I don't know what I am supposed to be doing, ever. I don't know what it is I want, or how to get it, or who I am going to be when I realize that I am more than their mother, and that at some point my life has to be about more than damage control and that I am fifteen years older than I realize and I have no idea where the time went. I'd been filling his head with my melancholy for the past month and I didn't really know if he had listened or cared, only that he was there.
In the wooden container was a tiny music box that plays Happy Birthday, and the pen was a silly, silver gel pen. A perfect, glittery magic wand that I did not even know that I wanted until I saw it, but suddenly it was representative of all of those things, all those things that I had not had, years of growing up too fast and sleeping in cars and with strangers and working in junior high and losing it all in a smoky bowl or a blotted, perforated page, and here was this pen. This glittery pen that was so childish and feminine and I have given a dozen of them to my own little girl because they seem to be everything that little girls are, happy and frivolous and impractical and completely perfect, while I write with a Bic Stic because it is cheap.
And there was a journal, and on the cover is Alice in Wonderland, weeks after that conversation. And he has written in the front, 'We present to you the choicest words'. This is something else that means something to me, and he knows it. And it occurs to me that he has given me this journal with the full knowledge that if I am writing in it I am not writing anywhere else, thus he will have no idea what I am writing about. I tell him this and he says I know, but I am not the one trying to find your way.
Stacy tells me that I must know by now that he adores me and I shrug her off, because that's just who he is, how he is, what he does. She laughs at me and tells me that I'm wrong. I think about this for the next two weeks, wondering if Johnny adores me, and if he does, why I do not adore him back. I do, but not in a boy/girl way, but rather in a, I don't know, playground love way. Until his confession last week, the one in which Stacy is correct and I am completely blind.
And I am chewing on this confession, and wondering what to do with it, and warning him that he knows who I am and what I do and why I do it and that I will probably not change for a long, long time. And he says yes, he knows, and the fact that I try to protect him only makes it worse. And I wonder if it's wrong of me to want both more and less than what he offers, to want something halfway, something in which my heart and head and body are in agreement. With this, I think that I am in love with him being in love with me, and that is wrong, wrong. I know it, but when I got home and he was waiting on my porch I didn't care. And this, now, makes everything else seem stupid because this is for real, this is his real heart and I have it, in my pocket, and I don't want it for the reasons I should want it, because I don't want him for the reasons he wants me, and I told him that, and I should be writing this in my journal but I'm not because I don't want to have to rip it out when I read it and see that I appreciate nothing, and that all those things I thought I wanted I do not actually want now that they are right in front of me, and that when presented with what is probably the most genuine affectionate offer that I may ever receive I turned it down because I did not want it, because I do not want him, because I am an imbecile.
posted by machine central at 3:01 AM
1 Comments:
What we want isn't necessarily what we need.
What we need isn't necessarily what we want.
It's okay if you don't know either yet.
Take your time. Don't rush. Don't feel so compelled to give him an absolute answer or conclusion just out of a sense of obligation. Enjoy the ride.
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