I wanted to be a jazz-saxophone-playing paleontologist when I was little. I failed the six year-old inside of me. The ephemera of everyday matters (maybe too much) to me. I have saved every. single. fortune cookie fortune I have had since I was 14 (that was about eight years ago...if you are keeping count). They are trapped in a box on my windowsill. Sometimes I dump them all out and read them, willing for the complements they pay me to be true...but I know they aren't.
I cannot stand to use the bathroom in a stall next to someone that I know. I will go to great lengths just to avoid chance encounters with acquaintances in restrooms. I hate it when people talk to you through stall walls. When I was in high school a kindly teacher carried on a lilting conversation about my younger sisters musical talents while she was in a stall near me. I heard too much. I'm still scarred. I was mortified.
When I am mortified my faces glows red. I'm talking do-you-need-to-see-a-specialist? red. Not beatific blushing red. This is real stuff, kids. But the color is not such a problem for me as I can usually hide it behind a veil of my hair.
Adolescent me hated my hair: it was hugely puffy, requiring me to move my head with great care so as not to gouge out the eyes of innocent bystanders, and randomly curly. Like the awkward love child of a poodle and a collie. A breed that didn't turn out quite right and was never given some media-savvy name like the labradoodle. I bought several special shampoos trying to control this morass of hair. These products served the express purpose of convincing my hair's frizziness to take on a survivor mentality, using Bear Gryll-ian tactics to take over the entirety of my scalp. I admire that kind of scrappiness.
I still wish on stars....eyelashes, dandelions,...eyebrow hairs that I have mistaken for eyelashes. However, after 21 years of this practice I am still not sure if it works. I'll have to get back to you on that
I love being the only person awake. I used to always be the last person asleep at sleepovers; it was lying there, amidst the perfume of stale popcorn that I learned how to be alone. I also learned (the hard way) that if you are the first person asleep at such a sleepover, embarrassing things will happen to you. Which reminds me, I'm terrified of rabbits, not wild rabbits but pet bunnies. But I have slept with a stuffed animal named Bun-Bun since I was ten. Bun-Bun is a rabbit. It is also still of an undetermined gender.
I may have too many compulsions. I only feel comfortable in my skin when I am swimming. And usually only when I am swimming in the ocean. My biggest fear is that the things I have never felt, no one will ever feel for me. But I have never really tried to cure this particular lonliness. Perhaps, then, I am not really lonely? I do not have that many secrets. I do not know if this is because I am boring...or because I share too much with other people. I am at once insecure and paranoid and unashamed to be what I am. I do not think this is strange. My theory is that we are all contradictions in this way.
The super-power I most wished for was flight. A 2001 tumble off of a play-house knocked that one right out of me. The super-power I now wish for is clairvoyance, if only just to affirm my behaviors. Attempts to become clairvoyant have all failed. But they have made me a very good listener...something I hope to share on this blog.
Hyper-normality may be a thing I cling to. I don't think I would ever say that out loud. The sound of my own voice makes me uncomfortable. When it's recorded, that is. I really didn't mind my voice until I heard a recording of it...it sounded foreign, more nasal than it does in my head. I have always wondered if that is the same for everyone.
Sometimes I am scared that, by some tragic turn of events, I will end up completely alone. Painfully full of words and love and jokes that remain unspoken because no one is left to hear them. I am scared that I am not brave enough. I am scared that life will pass me by. But mostly....
I'm scared that I might have killed the six year-old inside of me somewhere along the way.
So. That's the long answer as to why "To Whom it May Concern," has begun. This is where that six year-old comes back....listening in to what she has no business listening into, saying the things an adult might be too afraid to say (or at least, that this adult is) in real life, and imagining make-believe thoughts. Whatever that may mean.
Picture taken by my momma back in '97.
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