You were wearing that white hoodless sweatshirt with an image of a wolf on the front and, unintentionally, I had just gotten a young girl at the park to repeat out loud that “wolves are so last year.” I thought it was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard and getting someone else’s little girl to repeat what I’d just said made me feel accomplished in that silly “ha-ha that was a joke, but some day having kids is actually going to be pretty awesome” sort of way. I wonder now why it was you I had this experience with and no one else. Like it only ever could have happened with you. That it was supposed to happen that way.
We took a walk up the next few blocks. We were waiting again for him to get to my apartment and you were mad at me, trying feebly to explain why. Or perhaps the opposite, trying to shroud your feelings from me against my incessant needling. It was so early on. Now that I’d annoyed you, the only way I knew how to explain myself was to tell you truthfully how I felt. I was never certain if this worked. But on the way back to my place—after walking several blocks up the street and after he was already waiting on my doorstep—you took my hand in yours.
It was one of those moments when the bottom just suddenly falls out of pretty much everything; when you realize why exactly it is people feel a need to do silly things like marry, to try to suspend a moment in time for as long as they’re alive; when you understand that how you feel about someone has absolutely nothing to do with how long you’ve known them or the things they say or especially with how you want to feel. It’s the kind of moment that invariably fills me with a sense of elation and anxiety, with hope and despair.
Attention Paid to Unnecessary Things
You were upset with me again.
You were wearing that white hoodless sweatshirt with an image of a wolf on the front and, unintentionally, I had just gotten a young girl at the park to repeat out loud that “wolves are so last year.” I thought it was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard and getting someone else’s little girl to repeat what I’d just said made me feel accomplished in that silly “ha-ha that was a joke, but some day having kids is actually going to be pretty awesome” sort of way. I wonder now why it was you I had this experience with and no one else. Like it only ever could have happened with you. That it was supposed to happen that way.
We took a walk up the next few blocks. We were waiting again for him to get to my apartment and you were mad at me, trying feebly to explain why. Or perhaps the opposite, trying to shroud your feelings from me against my incessant needling. It was so early on. Now that I’d annoyed you, the only way I knew how to explain myself was to tell you truthfully how I felt. I was never certain if this worked. But on the way back to my place—after walking several blocks up the street and after he was already waiting on my doorstep—you took my hand in yours.
It was one of those moments when the bottom just suddenly falls out of pretty much everything; when you realize why exactly it is people feel a need to do silly things like marry, to try to suspend a moment in time for as long as they’re alive; when you understand that how you feel about someone has absolutely nothing to do with how long you’ve known them or the things they say or especially with how you want to feel. It’s the kind of moment that invariably fills me with a sense of elation and anxiety, with hope and despair.
I’m not sure that you noticed.