I'm alight with relief today. Because I realized this: I'm not her, I will never be her, and most importantly, I will never need to be her. I don't need to be her. And for all the reasons that I will never understand, he picked her, out of all the girls in the world. Their lives intersected. Honestly, she's too good for him, from what I can tell. Which makes me kind of smile to think that he always did have better taste in friends than in his actual self--maybe some sort of complex to make up for what he knows he lacks, all those things that he's too weak to change in himself. He surrounds himself with excellence to feel excellent. But he can never be excellent if he doesn't spend some time with himself, first. Associating with isn't the same as actually being, sweet one.
Anyway, back to the point at hand. Today, it hit me: I'm me and will always be me. When did I stop embracing that? Or, really, why? WHY. It hit me like a ton of bricks, except that I felt light after impact. So, this is isn't about her, really. It's about me making up for lost time, time lost on thoughts of you two. It's an apology to myself, really.
And I've come to tell you all the things that you were never a careful enough handler to see: I'm a girl whose imagination inundates everything with sparkling, which is why I moved to this fairy tale village of a city. I'm a girl who thinks with her heart and then desperately tries to justify it with logic because somewhere along the way it became apparent that heart-thoughts don't take you very far in this world. Which doesn't really work out, somehow, and which is probably why I'm unhappy so much of the time. And also why I write so much:it's the place where logic can make sense of the inside. I'm a girl who would linger over everything if I could, things like life (you want specifics?: conversations, hugs, kisses, books, walks. Dessert, but you knew that.) I'm a lingerer, always was. I linger in memories and in music. Two words to define me (they couldn't, not even close, but here's something that predominates my consciousness): music and memories. Or like, memories that music retrieves for me and sometimes just creates (yeah, a lot of the time, that's what it does.)
I'm a girl who thinks it's wrong to judge, unless of course, that judge is me. Oops. But I do have a certain amount of empathy for all things, people and bugs and trees, something you never did. I live inside my head (my heart, it's all one and the same in there for me.) I get a thrill when I do math problems correctly, so much so that I always think "If only all math problems came this easily to me, I would be content to spend my whole life figuring over equations." I love them because they fit together so perfectly, make so much sense, a foldable puzzle that I can unfold and refold again and again. Semi-addicting. And, I'm a girl who describes out loud like none other, it's a certain talent of mine, an audible flowing of beauty, bestowed. You never saw it that way, I fear, more just like "wordy, talky girl, dreamer." Yet you surrounded yourself with yet another one, I will never understand. Probably she's there to make up for the imagination you lack, no?
I'm a girl who worries--maybe that's the part of me you knew best, because that was the one place where you could have some control: "shh, you worry too much, sweetie." Very easy to take that versus confronting (or, maybe, rejoicing in...?)the magnitude of greatness hiding behind all those fears. But yeah, concern's a part of my daily diet. It's how I roll. Maybe it's my way of expressing my love for things, by trying to game things out all the time and realizing that I never could, not even close. Worry about my mom, like who she is and how come I never got to know her and maybe it's too late or maybe it's just the beginning and who will she allow herself to be since she always puts us girls first and who was she back in the hills on the Pacific and my guilt at being the reason she's not really there anymore even though it's not my fault, technically, that's just the nature of motherhood, anyway, but yeah, here's this person that I never thought to get to know, this person that I never thought to get. Any sadnesses there that she couldn't share, or that my sisters couldn't share, locked up tight and alone...
Or how the hell do people sleep out in this cold and how come not everyone worries about things like that or what about the hell on earth that is Haiti or the kids in American schools that are such an unrighteous joke or the fact that it seems the colored person always gets the perennial short end of the stick? And worry about the fact that maybe there's nothing real that I can actually do to fix it.
I'm a girl whose roots reach back as far as the freeways of Los Angeles and the peaks of Mount Baker and the sands of dunes and the gulf and camel poo and hot hot heat. All of which you know, nominally, but you never got the significance, the absolute hold these places have in my heart and in the way that I see things, which is, there's a lot of beauty, rush in with arms wide open--something that I stopped doing with you. Another big fat oops. I'm a girl who never felt safer than that one secret moment, a moment you will never know about now, because it happened after our paths permanently stopped crossing. My own moment, of joy and relief and safety and something sort of musky sweet, maybe fabric softener? It was the imprint of a dream, come true. God, that was great. Gentle and strong simultaneously, took my breath right out of my body and turned it into a sigh of peace. And, no, I'm not talking about sex.
I'm a girl who is a pirate at heart, just like mom always said, but for more than just the reasons she gave. Yes, it's my rambunctiousness of spirit, my love, absolute craving for adventures and surprises, my predilection for sparkly things, it's because I'm no weakling (I don't like shit going down, never have--the dude, in this case, does not abide,) but it's also because I'm a girl who can see the soul, constantly. In all. And I just can't let it go. I'm both haunted and enamored by the life and the love that just doesn't seem to leave my eyesight. My ideal man? Lloyd Dobler. I'm right here and waiting, waiting for your honesty and goodness and genuine interest in the things you love. And your loyalty, well, it's to the bone.
I'm a girl who thinks that life might be more fun as a boy, but I figure 1) not much I can do about that now and 2)girls have more fun superficially, no? We're the ones with the curvaceous bods and the boobs and I figure, there's a certain element of excitement there, the ability to dress up and look pretty, and to also be strong anyway. I'm a girl who would love to be a humanitarian, but man oh man, is there a certain connotation that people have when you say things like that, which has nothing to do with why I'm interested in it. I'm not interested in bringing people to see one way of life as better than another, I just want them to have that back, a way of life in the first place. I love them (whomever it is) and want them to be free, not because I'm free, but because it's the way it should be. I think that man is the most beautiful, complex, incredibly fascinating thing there is out there, and while I may not be alone in thinking this, I am definitely someone who finds satisfaction when there is a problem as scary as poverty staring me right in the face and the fact that there could be a way,maybe, to make whole the 'un'. We're messy, messy creatures and every fiber of my being screams "HELP THEM"
I'm a girl who loves her friends to a fault, but who never seems to be able to actually connect with them, except on rare instances of tandem. Which is so weird, but I really think it has a lot to do with me just absorbing who they are and not getting any of that in return; I don't take care to ensure that they know who I am, too. It's like there's so much good conversation and fun to be had and I'm always trying to figure how to attain it, when it was probably--in most cases--sitting there all along (if I had just let it be.)
I'm a girl who really is a broken record, at heart, but I'm so in love with the grooves of said record that I just have to keep replaying it and replaying it, moving my hands over the well-loved and worn, reveling in the new details gradually becoming apparent. That's what my life is, actually: a broken record (myself) played to a different audience every time (you, them, whomever.) And it's great, actually, because it's the audiences' reaction that makes the song worth listening to, the nuance they take away from it that you didn't even notice. I'm not saying I'm not open to change, it's just that the fiber of my being is essentially the same throughout. So, that can be boring at times, don't get me wrong, but it's also really nice to have an assured foundation. I'm a girl who is afraid that the tone of this piece is all wrong, not my real voice at all, and entirely too sing-songy. Which fucking sucks, just to let you know, but I am trying to write things as I think them. Hmm. Guess you wouldn't know the difference, though, because one thing that we never did and should have done a lot more of was exchanging who we are with each other, and writing's a good way to do just that.
There's more, so much more, so much that I should have been brave enough to show you. But I'm hungry and have a midterm to study for, which should be considerably easier now that I have all of this off my (tiny) chest.
I know what you're thinking right now, "oh, feisty girl, feminist, so overbearingly self-righteous" but what you don't get is that this is the love letter that you should have been writing me every day, if you had only paid attention to what you had.
Did you know that was me? Did you see?
I realized what was bothering me this whole time and why I had to write this ridiculously long who-knows-what: I never set the record straight. For her. For you. And by doing that, really, just for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment