Dusty Bookshelves

Month: February 2016

  • This isn’t fun for me anymore. 

    2/21/16

    Dear Morgan, 

    After getting back from New Orleans and writing a lot about it in my journal, trying to capture everything great and worth remembering about our trip, I realized things are drastically unwell between us. We did have some good times, but, really, most of the times with you there that I could write about were instances when berated me on the street for petty things, times when you would get me so mad I would have nothing to say to you for hours, and times I would try to open up to you about things going on in my life and you would drop the conversation abruptly. 

    We need to talk about this, and I don’t think we’ll ever get to a point where it will come up in face-to-face conversation, because as it stands, I don’t feel like I have permission with you to talk about good feelings, let alone hurt ones. In short, Morgan, ever since your move here, I usually walk away from hanging out with you feeling small and stupid. 

    I feel like I have to do a lot of self-censoring to ensure that our friendship remains intact. Anymore, you and I can’t seem to have an easy-flowing, shoot-the-breeze conversation. You only want to talk about food, drink, and impersonal things related to taste, whereas I need to talk about feelings, identity and relationships. We both have an aversion to each others’ fundamental interests, or maybe its that we just don’t know how to talk about them in a way that feels engaging or respectful. When we can’t connect, though, we default to a longstanding dynamic for us – you criticize me for petty things and I just accept it and fume silently.

    It feels like in almost every conversation, you bring up me something you hate about me:

    I’m always tripping on rocky sidewalks. 

    I’m messy.

    I’m cheap.

    I’ve an unsophisticated pallet.

    I’m not to be trusted building a playlist for my own parties.

    Whether or not any of the things you say to me are true, the fact that they are the sole things you characterize me by makes me feel like shit. I honestly can’t even remember the last time you told me anything you actually liked about me. As if you consider it my fault I’m not interested in always talking about food, drinks and restaurant, so it’s on me to try to bridge the gap. 

    After this trip, I realized I can’t do it alone, and I need you to try and meet me halfway. 

    You being hyper critical of me is a familiar dynamic for us, I think, a relic from our days at Hood. Maybe this type of behavior management was something I needed back then when I had no real boundaries to react to anywhere else my life except a class schedule. That was two different cities ago. I’ve changed drastically in each move, but I sense you’re unwilling to recognize it. I’m not the meandering kid I was in college, and I now have a job and an adult relationship with my family that judges my every move, and I am really struggling with dealing with all the judgment I get from you, too.

    I think we need to get to know each other again and redefine our relationship in a way that doesn’t make me feel like the liability you simply keep around. By almost every measure, I’m unhappy right now, and I need my best friend to help me get through it and into something better. Part of that entails helping me figure out what that looks like. I need you to be able to expand your understanding of me so I can keep growing into something new. I need you to finally get over the fact I’m not a graceful walker. I need you to learn how to talk about feelings without leaving me hanging every time I bring mine up. Most importantly, I need you to be excited about helping me plan the wedding that Iwant: not resigned when talking about it at birthday parties, nor demanding when we are at a bar start talking about its structure.

    We need to do something different, Morgan. I don’t want to lose you, but this isn’t fun for me anymore. 

    Tim

  • The Jonas Bonus

    The Jonas Blizzard came on smooth like a velvet blanket draping onto your lap as you sit in front of a fire. The restaurants down the street asked the locals to risk the “The Jonas Bonus,” a clever smile eliding over the fact that, once the plates have been cleared off the table and you have walked back to your apartment across the street, those waiters would have to drive home over white roads that sank beneath their tires. Snow plows were out in full force, taking to the corporate downtown districts in hordes of ten plows at a time – slow parades showered by nickel-sized snowflakes spinning down like confetti.

    This was the day after the skies cleared, when the front door gets stuck against a frozen wall the  first time it swings outward.  All over the neighborhood, the shadows of seven-foot snow mounds slant at forty-five degree angles, and the contrast of the white snow and the black imprints of the blocked sun on the sidewalk make an emphatic yin-and-yang on the cleared walkways along the road.

    Store parking lots were like mazes – being too big to clear out all at once, so guesstimated trails are hammered out of the whole. These paths were incredibly intentional, but only for the specific trip in which it was shoveled.  They branched away in pursuit of a faraway sidewalk, a car that was parked in a residential spot but is no longer there. Grocery carts are exactly where they were left three days prior, lost in the consecutive accumulation of a whole-weekend blizzard. I’m sitting in the basket of one of them, facing him as he runs full speed ahead.

    The only thing I could tell is that, by the slogging noise of the wheels churning something thick, he’s breaking free from the cleared track someone made in the snow. All I see is the scruff of his face outlined by the beige hoodie, which is itself outlined by the cloudless blue sky above. Laughing, because I can’t see where he’s going. I can’t know much for sure right then, though, and I was thrilled by the mystery.

    I’m reminded of something I read, that said that new parents are advised to only push rear-facing strollers for the first year or two after birth. A child needs to see the constant and familiar face of your love to be grounded. Facing away can be traumatic for them, because their understanding of object permanence has yet to develop . You’ve disappeared from them, and now the world is rushing over them at an unprecedented speed. It’s too much for them to process all at once.

    Here I was, two years old and laughing like I’ve forgotten how to stop.

    Because, really, I have.

    Dealing with insecurity is a skill we learn and just as quickly forget over the course of a lifetime.

    When the cart stops spinning, he takes ten steps back and starts filming.

    “Try to get out of the basket!” he yells on-camera. I’m too big to do it gracefully, a stocky 27-year-old who has the limberness of an ex-runner and current cubicle worker. I’m self-conscious, but I am happy. The video captures everything: grunts, mumbling, the eventual panting from loss of breath. I recoil at the thought of it going online, but I am happy of the photographic proof that, today, I am happy.

    I am happy for object permanence; I’m happy for losing control; and I’m happy for the powdery snow that blows off the roof of every building, because it feeds the illusion that the snowfall and this moment aren’t both already over.