… but you can come in anyway. Close the door (you know I have a thing about that) and stay a while. Pull up a pillow or a piece of soft white blanket stained with a Cabernet of some persuasion, close your eyes for a minute and breathe it in.
1:27am. December 22. Candles flickering softly and Sufjan whispering in the background. This, my new nighttime ritual, smacks of aspiring introspection – my favorite poetic synonym for insomnia. There’s not much left for me here in the suburbs, and with the blissful complacency and prosperity of the region gone by the hands of free-market capitalism, the only safe place left is this one. With the walls painted seven shades of sherbet, and countless artifacts from the rose-colored days of old.
Every night, I give myself a task. To revisit all the scrapbooks from my time at Albion. To re-read the entries in my blog. To re-read the words I wrote about what I saw and read and reflect on it further. To read other peoples’ words to glean further perspective about the truth of what it is that’s happened these last few years.
That last one was tonight’s task. But I got stuck on the first blog in my list of bookmarked wordpresses. And it wasn’t the blog itself that got me, but the owner of some of its comments. A name/presence/another compartmentalized life I’ve know about for some time, but today it occurred to me to follow the path to her thoughts. I spent quite some time reading through the life of someone I’ve never met. At times, I felt like a stalker or an intruder, barging in on a world where I didn’t belong, but then I remembered the first rule of internet journaling. They are public. If you don’t want it seen, write it in the book you keep under your mattress.
I remembered the time I was found surprisingly, and in a similar circumstance. An old flame of a one time lover commented on a post I made, referencing what I found to be a rather amusing nickname she had coined for me in a moment of weakness. In the end, she and I exchanged warm sentiments and found common ground I had never expected. Fear not my stone-faced one, I have no intention of making the same connection, in any public capacity. I am, after all, in my selfish phase of life, so I will merely reap what I can from this in the privacy of my own oasis.
But I digress…
You wanted to read about me stalking. I read and read and read, and as I re-read, things became clearer. I cross referenced your words, and my notes about timelines, and we all began to fit together like sections of the same newspaper. Why hello Section D, I’m Section B. Nice to meet you. I wondered what all the fuss was about back there. Once I figured out how we all fit together, I began to listen. You, little lady, say you’re pretty good at that, and I would believe it. I read the way you’d changed in a year, and I read in between the lines. squeezed myself between your lines, and squeezed you between mine.
I came to two conclusions. First, that I have been given a great gift. Not only did God bless me with the internet (so I can learn all about your life all the way from little old Detroit) but with an angel Clarence of sorts. I got to see what I expect my life would have looked like if I were in your place. Physically, and otherwise. Your frustrations and your bliss, your unrivaled communication skills, and your inconsistent perfection. Your words sound eerily like mine, and I suspect we have at least one pronoun in common. Most of us don’t get a chance to see the “what if”, and I consider myself lucky (to have seen it, and frankly, to have the “what if” that I got). I’d always suspected that even if we did yoga, made breakfast and listened to Teeth in the Grass, and lay beneath shooting stars every night, it wouldn’t look quite the way I paint it in my dreams. I’m glad I’m not alone, I guess, and I’m happy I get to leave those shortcomings at the entrance to the security line with my half-drunk bottle of water and other assorted liquids over 100ml.
Conclusion #2? I’ve done all I can to make a story out of the fragments I’ve been collecting in my life over the last 2 years, but what interests me now is the lives of others. I know where you fit in my life. (most/all of you.) But where do I fit in yours? Here I am, reading your friends accounts of you, putting them together with what I know and have believe, trying to figure out what your life means. Who are you my friend, and what have these past 2 years meant to you? I know what you meant to me now, but I wonder what I meant to you.
You see, I’m getting better about putting the pieces in my own life together. I’m beginning to assemble prose in my head, and I’m starting to craft metaphors that mean something, not just ones that grasp the air desperately looking. I’m beginning to figure out where everything and everyone in my life these last two years fits, and how to move forward given the pieces I have, had, and hope to hold in the future.
But that’s as far as I can get on my own. My mother has taken to trying to convince me that I may be an extrovert, and I’m beginning to believe she’s right. At the very least, I’m incredibly curious.
I know of no more encouraging fact that the unquestionable ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. -Henry David Thoreau
yours.Rachel
