Tuesday, December 23, 2003
will she remember me?
today, my mom and i visited the home of my oldest friend. oldest as in we've been friends since our moms were best friends and were pregnant together. but not in a creepy sorority way; we're both pretty interesting, cool people but we separated paths for a long time in school. mostly because she was gorgeous and a cheerleader and very good with people while i was a basket case with high grades and bad skin.
she's awfully cool now. she's extremely beautiful, but she wears it in such a completely guileless way that it makes absolutely no difference except how happy your eyes get when you look at her. she married this cool guy and moved around with him while he's learning to fly airplanes. i met him at someone's wedding three years ago. they seem entirely happy, and far more interesting than i guessed normal people could be. they're beautifully normal, except when i say normal i don't mean it like creepy the way i usually do.
i hung out with their first daughter, samantha, tonight. we cracked each other up. she gummed a cookie. i stroked her tiny, tiny foot. i told her that she should hang out with me when she can, as she gets older, because i will teach her to smoke and buy her beer and birth control. my friend laughed, but later she whispered: "seriously, i might take you up on the birth control. i'm not sure i can give her the talk."
and i watched her, with a baby on her hip in her mid-twenties, and it looked really good to me. i never thought it would. part of that is because she's so eye-stoppingly phsyically gorgeous, and i can tell i think that if i had a baby at twenty six i would magically look like that. and feel like what i think it feels like to be beautiful on the outside. but there's something else going on in her pretty face, too, a happiness . . . a satisfaction, that i envy. i would like for that baby to be all it would take to make me feel like i was doing what i should be doing, doing good, doing fine.
i would like to know what i could do that would make me feel, this is what i should be doing, i'm doing good, i'm doing fine. despite being happier inside my core than i've ever been, my outside feels like a flop. like something that didn't pan out. you know, like a dessert that you think is going to be fabulous and you work and work and then you eat it, and it's kind of like, well . . . i guess chocolate cake never really sucks . . .
i'll figure it out. but i wish there were less figuring.
she's awfully cool now. she's extremely beautiful, but she wears it in such a completely guileless way that it makes absolutely no difference except how happy your eyes get when you look at her. she married this cool guy and moved around with him while he's learning to fly airplanes. i met him at someone's wedding three years ago. they seem entirely happy, and far more interesting than i guessed normal people could be. they're beautifully normal, except when i say normal i don't mean it like creepy the way i usually do.
i hung out with their first daughter, samantha, tonight. we cracked each other up. she gummed a cookie. i stroked her tiny, tiny foot. i told her that she should hang out with me when she can, as she gets older, because i will teach her to smoke and buy her beer and birth control. my friend laughed, but later she whispered: "seriously, i might take you up on the birth control. i'm not sure i can give her the talk."
and i watched her, with a baby on her hip in her mid-twenties, and it looked really good to me. i never thought it would. part of that is because she's so eye-stoppingly phsyically gorgeous, and i can tell i think that if i had a baby at twenty six i would magically look like that. and feel like what i think it feels like to be beautiful on the outside. but there's something else going on in her pretty face, too, a happiness . . . a satisfaction, that i envy. i would like for that baby to be all it would take to make me feel like i was doing what i should be doing, doing good, doing fine.
i would like to know what i could do that would make me feel, this is what i should be doing, i'm doing good, i'm doing fine. despite being happier inside my core than i've ever been, my outside feels like a flop. like something that didn't pan out. you know, like a dessert that you think is going to be fabulous and you work and work and then you eat it, and it's kind of like, well . . . i guess chocolate cake never really sucks . . .
i'll figure it out. but i wish there were less figuring.
