On the walk home tonight, I passed by a sidewalk covered in chalk drawings. There were spiders and rocketships and a sailboat perched on a rocky sea getting pummeled by lightning. You could tell which of the drawings had been done by adults and which had been done by children, because the ones drawn by children were much more imaginative. I looked at the drawings for a little while and thought about how nice it would be to just lie down next to them. The sidewalk would be cold and I would get chalk on my clothes but it might feel like disappearing into another world, a world where dinosaurs still exist and the sun has a sweet, charming face.
The trouble with living in a city that isn’t built on a grid is that, with a sense of direction like mine, I get lost very easily. On side streets that turn suddenly into 35% grade hills, in BART stations on the outskirts of the city and in gourmet produce markets I am consistently lost and alone.
I think that caring about someone is not minding getting lost with them, and last night I told the only person in this city willing to do so with me that I couldn’t see him anymore.
I would marry him if I could, if we had made different choices. I’ve never thought that about anyone before. “I just wish I had met you when I was younger,” he says. “Then everything would be perfect.” What time has done to him is what I fear it will do to me: it has made him a shell, a hollow thing. Where once there was light there isn’t any longer. At 22, light streams from beneath my fingernails and from the delicate tips of my eyelashes. I go with him to dark places and the whole room begins to glow. It’s my pureness that he loves, but it’s also my pureness that separates us. “You are too good to me,” he mutters into the smudge of my hair. He means that I should be terrible to him, but I am young and I love him, so I don’t know how to yet.
I think the point is to find someone who wants to be good alongside you, in the same ways you want to be good. It’s the naivety of youth that makes hope flutter and sway in my chest, that illuminates small rooms; it allows romantic interlopers with ten stiff years on me and hearts left on the chopping block to seek solace in my light.
We are always falling in love with each other in different ways, at different times. I see the chalk monsters with their jagged blue teeth and I hope that, some day, we all get the timing just right.
Audio:
i like the podcasting idea; i might steal it. also, beautiful post.
A beautiful piece of writing. And very true.
This is beautiful. I love you
Wow. That’s all I have to say.
Both podcast and essay are beautiful. Love.