Circle
Even when I was growing up in the midst of thirty or so cousins, I have always chosen to be alone, reading books, writing something or other, making paper dolls, tinkering with a craft. And I was fine. I grew up a loner by choice, and I have learned to guard my solitude by slowly developing a subtle set of habits that would naturally and instinctively make people stop approaching me when they get to a certain degree of proximity. As I grew older I also grew more and more introspective, and I remember some of my happiest moments to be when I would be sitting in my own warm, dark, limpid pool of thoughts as the world passed me by in multicolored windy frenzy. I grew more and more set in my ways in this murky, arcane wilderness that I nurtured, the people around me still there, but always just at the borderline that I have set for them.
I’m not sure if they noticed. If anyone noticed, I think they just decided to respect my reticent ways as a part of who I am. And I have been pretty consistent with it for most of my life. Friends, cousins, other relatives, classmates, cousins, siblings, officemates, long-ago boyfriends, they have always kept a genteel distance, leaving me free to wallow and revel in the privacy of having my own time and my own space and my own being. Even my very own son has learned to let me be, and we have learned to live in a state of cultured togetherness. And for the almost four decades that I have been alive, this has been so.
But then came T, and everything changed. Now I have more friends than ever, and noisy Friday nights, and talk of guns and movies and rock stars and New Wave and superheroes and dogs, sons and school and travel and mountains and boat rides, and I am not so reticent anymore. I have learned to reach out and talk to people, to call them up to ask how they are from time to time, and to share my opinions and stories with them. This is my circle now, and it's full of color, and it’s growing bigger and bigger, like my world, like my heart, like my life with T.
[Image credit]
I’m not sure if they noticed. If anyone noticed, I think they just decided to respect my reticent ways as a part of who I am. And I have been pretty consistent with it for most of my life. Friends, cousins, other relatives, classmates, cousins, siblings, officemates, long-ago boyfriends, they have always kept a genteel distance, leaving me free to wallow and revel in the privacy of having my own time and my own space and my own being. Even my very own son has learned to let me be, and we have learned to live in a state of cultured togetherness. And for the almost four decades that I have been alive, this has been so.
But then came T, and everything changed. Now I have more friends than ever, and noisy Friday nights, and talk of guns and movies and rock stars and New Wave and superheroes and dogs, sons and school and travel and mountains and boat rides, and I am not so reticent anymore. I have learned to reach out and talk to people, to call them up to ask how they are from time to time, and to share my opinions and stories with them. This is my circle now, and it's full of color, and it’s growing bigger and bigger, like my world, like my heart, like my life with T.
[Image credit]
posted by Maryanne Moll | 12:09 AM
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