Doors and Windows

What is this feeling

Today I was bored.

It took me about an hour to understand what I was feeling.

I haven’t been bored in a long time.

So I went on travelocity.com and browsed plane tickets for a while.

Smile.

My life has been perfect for a long time.

When I was a sophomore in high school I had a teacher who would sometimes choose to take long walks in the woods instead of coming to our class.  All of my classmates thought that he was remarkable.  I was irritated because I wasn’t learning any French.  He often chose to share bits of wisdom with us, usually famous quotations.  One day he looked at me and said: “The most important story is the story you tell yourself.”

She has a younger sister who is probably the person she loves most in this world.  Parents who are artistic and intelligent and wild.  Two adorable cats.  An apartment filled with shiny leather and glass.  A pile of awards wedged under her bed gathering dust. 

 “You’re perfect.” 

Her best friend said it.  It wasn’t the first time she had heard it but it was still intoxicating.

Her parents started with nothing.  She didn’t remember when they stopped using food stamps.  She was too young to care.  Her father started a car restoration business a couple years after she was born.  His shop was small and for a time he and her mother were the only employees.  She wrote and illustrated stories for her sister on the paper used to mask off cars before they were painted, built fairy huts in the woods, and played until it was difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy.

It was too easy to forget.  So easy that when she looked back later she couldn’t tell if what happened was just make believe.

You weren’t around very often.  And then you weren’t around at all. 

Being homeless wasn’t the way she thought it would be.  They didn’t look any different.  She still had a couple boxes filled with toys.  They simply didn’t have a place to live.  She, her sister, and her mother had sleepovers at a friend’s house.  Then they took the train down to Virginia to stay with some members of their extended family that she had never met.  That was the first time she rode a train.  She loved it.    

I took that year and I folded it neatly, taking care to make sure that no wrinkles would form.  I put it away in a place where I wouldn’t look for it. And it disappeared. 

And suddenly their parents were married again.  The two sisters turned the industrial park into a Neverland of their own again, running around in their plaid Catholic school uniforms, tearing holes in their knee high socks when they climbed over boulders. 

Your life was never mine.  So Mom compensated by giving me hers.  And now I don’t know how to give it back to her.

She had always been most comfortable on stage.  She wanted to be an actress before she wanted to be a college student.

Somewhere along the line she started smiling.  I think it was in sixth grade.  It was so simple.  Whenever she felt anything she would smile.  And there would be no questions.  A couple months later her best friend told her, “You’re perfect.”

And after a while, I couldn’t distinguish which of my smiles were genuine.

The traffic lights flashed like little red and green suns popping in and out of view.  It was too dark for them so see each other’s faces.  He asked her if she had ever wondered about her family.  She hadn’t just wondered.  Those questions defined her.  They shaped everything she did.  She was the peacekeeper.  It was her mission, to hide all of her questions, and to prove to everyone around her that she had a perfect life, that she could prevent the fights, that she could be the voice of reason.  She had never asked him because she assumed that the truth was something ugly, terrifying.

Sheltered.  I fucking hate that word.

I don’t deserve my life.  I worked so hard in high school, deprived myself of sleep to the point where people suspected that I had narcolepsy.  That was easy.  It was for myself.  I always think of myself first.  I’m selfish and the worst part is that people think that I am selfless.  The very fact that I have the audacity to write about my “personal life” when I am this fortunate proves this fact.

She had been 19 for exactly 29 minutes when she received the phone call.  Her mother put him on the phone.  She sat curled up in the window seat of the dorm hallway and pressed her nose against the window pane, looking out into the yard.  Things were complicated again.  Every time she managed to forget… She called back him twice before he answered.  He said goodbye without wishing her a happy birthday.  She sighed, stood, and went to rejoin her friends.  Smile.  No one could tell that something was wrong.  And she realized how good an actress she was.  And she was worried.

And then I got angry.

And stayed angry.

It wasn’t until I moved out that I started to realize that my home life wasn’t typical. I wanted to make friends who actually knew me but all I could do was smile.  And I think that people see me as silly and unintelligent because of that habit.  But indulging my pride would require that I make myself vulnerable.

My hand was accidentally closed in a car door a couple days ago.  And I laughed.

I ran a couple miles and I wanted to walk further.  I loved watching the way the trees scratched the sky.  Walking down the hill was harder than running.  I had to hold myself back and the impact hurt my shins.  So I let myself fall into a sprint.  The sun and the trees blurred and I was sailing down the smooth black pavement and it was beautiful.

And as I ran there were words: I thought that my mind was a labyrinth but it’s actually a spiral and I’ve been walking toward the center for years.

Which is why I can’t smile at you anymore.

I remember that you apologized a few times: “I’m sorry that I was never a ‘Brady Bunnch’ dad.” 

I sat in the backseat and thought: Well whose fucking fault is that?

But what I said was, “It’s ok.”

A few minutes after the phone call my friends held a surprise party for me to celebrate my birthday.  As I hugged them each in turn I thought of how much I cared about them and how sad it was that they hardly knew me.

I’m so scared of what will happen when my life is no longer perfect.  How people will act toward me.  That smile was the most consistent thing about me.

thinking too much about too many things