Tuesdays...

...don't know why they're called 'Tuesday'. Why are they not called 'Hopday' or 'Absolute Zero' or some other word that might more accurately depict the nonentity of this day, they wonder quietly late at night, well past bedtime.

I will never have an answer that they can live with, of course, because I don't run the universe. I wouldn't want to, either. Far too many complications for a little creature like myself to even begin to ponder.

Moving on.

It's summer. There is some part of me that relishes the advent of hot weather; that tough, olive-skinned, Mediterranean part of me that loves grape leaves and buttery filo/phyllo dough pastries. That part that delights in the sun and blue skies and heat, heat, heat of summer outdoors and slowly becoming a brown-skinned wild thing. That part of me that has been sleeping for some time, allowing me several years of quiet and unremarkable summers nearly devoid of running and the sound of the wind in my ears and the feeling of leaves in my hair. I don't know why I've remembered this year, but I have, and I'm happy about it.

I have a large number of pale-skinned friends of solidly Northern stock who aren't too keen on summer and sweat, scowl, burn, or grumble as the heat sinks into their skin. I also have a friend or few who look forward to the sun's return and proudly pull their tanktops out of storage on the first day on which the temperature breaks past sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. I have been quieter about my feelings about summer, mostly, partially due to a certain forgetfulness that has gone along with my growing up.

It's a little strange, actually. For the last several years I've felt a bit as though I were living in a dream, or had been otherwise asleep since 1997. But lately it's been different--everything's been brighter and harsher and wilder. Somehow something found a way past the thorns I keep all around me and whispered, "Wake up."

Good morning.

Your daughter, I'm sorry ma'am. Your daughter...

She's gone from this place of waiting
She's left herself off the list
There's no one here but me today,
and I'm not the one you've missed.

I woke up a half-hour ago to the sound of nothing. I looked at my watch, put on my glasses and looked at the clock, and finally figured out what was bothering me--my alarm wasn't blaring at me. I flopped around in bed for another ten minutes until I got a phone call that almost made sense to me.

I was still partially dreaming, and I had woken myself up rather determinedly from a dream that was going places I don't even allow myself to think. Now I need to go wash my body because I can't sweep clean my mind and I am continually almost remembering and...not touching my dreams, because they are dreams, and do not deserve thinking on sometimes.

Incidentally, I've made it into the 'I's. Interesting.
Anon!

When she called you, you came.

It's not a miracle, just the simple fact of human bonding.

She gave herself to you whole-heartedly, but you didn't know what to do with her. So you ran, quickly, hoping to outrace your beliefs and escape your past. Unfortunately, time and tide catch up to the fastest of us, and you were far from swift. If you could have trusted just a little more, believed a little harder, danced with your whole body instead of just wiggling your feet in time to the beat...perhaps then you could have become a whole person instead of maintaining a steady pace as half-a-person.

Who will ever know what you could have been? We certainly won't. All we can do is observe, patiently or with irritation, as you fall into the traps you've set for yourself. But for us, that's the norm. We don't mind waiting, because we know that, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. We go home, we retreat to have dinner with our wives or husbands, our two-point-five children or back to our empty apartments with echoing walls where no one comes but ourselves. You don't really matter. Not to us, because we don't have to watch you struggle when we want to leave.

But your choices (or lack thereof) will remain with you, and you will think on them in the dead of night when there is nothing there to comfort you. Four a.m. knows all my secrets. It was written in a terrible first novel by a lady novelist with more problems in her left tit than you could imagine in your whole life, but you're the one who knows what it means; you're the one who internalized that sentiment and made it yours. The shadows are asleep in your room, but you fantasize that they crawl about under your bed, whispering to each other about you.

She called you, and you came to her, wistfully hoping that this time it would be the last. This time you could finally gift someone else with that mystical You that you think about as a person almost apart from the reality of the skin and hair and pimples and shiny bleak eyes that so often leak ugly tears. You couldn't give her that idealized Self, of course. You can't, not while you're stuck in the place you are, and possibly never. Doesn't it pain you to know that you're impossibly inadequate? Of course it does, though on some level you keep trying to tell yourself that you're fine, there's no problem. You keep trying, but you're the only one you need to convince, and your own words have never been able to fully embed themselves into your skin, never been able to sink deeply enough, never been able to convince the you that is that you are the you that you wish you were. It's convoluted, but that's what you try to be. It's like a maze--if you get yourself lost enough near the center, you forget that someday you'll have to find your way back out.

It's so pretty where you are, though, isn't it? The flowers are beautiful, and the fountains rush in the prettiest way. Naturally, the walls are far too tall to see over, no matter how many little stone benches you stand on. Perhaps if you could grow a little more, you might be able to see over that one, there, on the right side...! But no. You're stuck, and if you try to climb the walls, you'll get thorns in your skin.

She called you, but only once, and yet you raced to her, desperation dogging your steps. Why did you give up so much to rush to her side? We all wonder this sometimes, particularly when you sit and complain and cry at us about her coldness, her heartless nature. Then we laugh at you and your foibles, your fallacies, your failure to tell truth from wishes. You never took the lessons from your fairy tales, did you? You never learned that the woods conceal witches, that the beasts are sometimes princes, or that princes are sometimes beasts. You always thought that the bears were overreacting to the hungry little girl eating their porridge, that the wicked stepmother was purest evil, that the princesses must be rescued before the time ran out or face some unknown pain or death. Surely the story stopped when you stopped reading, you thought. You never connected the fact that the story, your story, never ends, not even when you sleep (which you can manage sometimes, despite the shadows giggling).

Things are changing and you don't know how to keep up. We don't mind, though we think sometimes that we would help you if you asked. All it might take is one lonely outstretched hand and we'd catch you up safe as houses, though houses aren't that safe to ride with us. First you would have to notice that we're here, though, and we're not inclined to help you unblind your eyes. We don't like to involve ourselves where we're not wanted, you see, and as much as you struggle, we like to think you want to arrive at our conclusions by yourself.

So we watch, we wait, and someday, perhaps soon, perhaps never, you'll call out to us.

But it wouldn't be a miracle, just so you know. Just the simple fact of human bonding.