You've Got A Lot To Say, I'm Not The One To Make You Feel This Way, But You've Got A Lot To Say, And You've Got A Lot To Prove
--"Echo", The Bridges
"Can we buy a sponge first?" she asked as soon as she had gotten into the rented tan Corrolla. I thought to ask what she needed the sponge so urgently so far, but then I thought better of it.
"Sure."
Toby was dressed in a pinkish shirt with black tiger stripes on it. I remembered that because I thought it was odd that somebody as reserved as she proclaimed to be would wear something so garish out. Sure, she had sent me pictures about what she looked like when she went out, but somehow the pictures were something unreal, something like she was dressing up in costume. Seeing her in person was an entirely different reality.
"I would do it on my own time, but I figured since we'll be out..." her voice trailed off.
As far as first meetings go, it wasn't exactly Romeo and Juliet finding each other across the crowded room, but it was memorable. More than that, it was what I had hoped would happen when I first came to pick her up in front of her parents' house. I didn't want to spend a lot of time going through the motions of introductions or greetings. That's a brand of awkwardness that most of the time I could do without. I couldn't remember if I had imparted this knowledge to young Miss Frisson sometime in the last few months, but whether she picked up on the hint or such was her natural behavior, it was my natural behavior to skip the formalities and to get right into the meat of the matter.
I mean--I was excited to meet her as I'm sure she was to meet me for the first time face-to-face. Yet after talking to her off and on on the phone for the last year, it wasn't like she had to go through the rudimentary biography beforehand. It truly did felt like we had known each other for far longer than the occasion would have accounted for. I've just always found that the surest way to combat nervousness at first encounters is to treat them like they aren't first encounters. In fact, some of the best introductions I've ever had were the ones where I didn't couch it like an introduction at all. From telling people about the nuances of my day to peppering them about the more intimate portions of theirs, I've never gone into a worthwhile friendship treating it as if we were in first throes of getting to know one another. The way I figure it, you're always in the process of getting to know someone. However, you don't have to ever base your whole perspective on this fact. You really should go into every conversation as if you already know enough about the individual in particular to be holding a conversation with them. That's how I treated Toby on that day, that it was like the umpteenth time I've spent time with her even if was technically the first time I ever spent time with her face-to-face.
"Follow this street out and then make a left at the second light," she instructed me solemnly after I asked where we needed to go to.
Even while I was watching the road, out of the corner of my eye I noticed she wasn't entirely there. She's always been naturally reticent, but I was expecting a few more words to be falling from her mouth--small talk or not. I wanted to ask her what was wrong. I wanted to find out and help. But I knew Toby was the kind of person that didn't need to be questioned. She would open up about what was bothering her eventually.
"So what do you need the sponge for?"
"No reason. I was doing the dishes after breakfast this morning and I noticed we needed a new one."
"Really?"
"Yeah, it's a habit. I like to buy a new sponge every two weeks on the dot. Usually I get my mom to do it, but since you're here."
I thought about it for a second before replying.
"Did you actually need the sponge then? Or was it more the two weeks were up?"
"Gosh. I don't know. After two weeks I start to think of the sponge as worn out. I couldn't even tell you if it's still usable."
"Can I tell you something funny, Marion?"
"What."
"I don't even know when the last time I bought a sponge was. I usually come home one day and there's just a new one there. It's kind of like the sponge fairy visits whenever I need a new one."
She attempted to laugh, but the slump to her shoulders and the way her voice had a habit of trailing off told me that her heart just wasn't into the humor of the situation. I had thought that would have gotten a rise out of her. Just the previous week I had told her that a scoop of cookie dough ice cream I had been eating had somehow ended up on the floor. When I had informed her that I had picked it off the dirty kitchen floor and put it back into my glass bowl she practically hung up the phone on me. It took me telling her that the kitchen floor wasn't as dirty as I made it out to be and that I had only dropped a spoonful at most to get her to calm down. Now she took the news that I wasn't exactly the most vigilant sponge monitor in the world with as much disgust as if I'd told her that I had blown my nose.
That's the problem with the meeting someone for the first time and they're not exactly jazzed to see you. You want them to be as excited for the meeting as you are for it, but to them it's more of a routine. Toby wasn't the one who had flown two thousand miles anywhere. She wasn't the one who had to rent a car. She wasn't the one holed up in a Sheraton across the river. She had woken up in the same bed she had woken up in the day before. She had had breakfast in her parents' house like she had the day before. And now she was riding down to the local store and picking up the same kind of sponge she apparently picked up every two weeks. The companion had changed, but she was still in the midst of her routine.
I had the feeling if she hadn't been mired in her own problems, she would have been more considerate of mine. I could forgive her for that. It didn't make dealing with the awkward silences any easier, however. It made for a very quiet few blocks' ride.
On the outside she looked alright--pink tiger shirt aside. But on the inside I couldn't help but wonder what kind of demons she was keeping at bay. For the first time in a long time I realized how maddening it was to have a friend who was naturally secretive. I'd gotten spoiled on Breannie, whose worst problem has always been knowing when to cool her jets. Talking problems out with her came as easily as falling off a log. I knew from day one that getting familiar with Toby's routines would be a wholly different experience. I could even see that in the way she writes. She writes far more in metaphor and imagery than most people I know. She doesn't spell it out for you A-B-C. She forces you to puzzle it out some. And even when she is being forthright she never entirely clues you into every detail. There's always been a part to her that remains under lock and key; there's always been a part she keeps to herself in order to maintain the illusion that nobody can understand all of her.
To be fair, that's always been the part that intrigued me most about her. I'm naturally secretive with most people. There's always been a part of me that feels like nobody understands everything about me. There's always been a manner in which I've held things in because I don't feel like people would want to concern themselves with my problems. Only people like Jina, Brandy, DeAnn, and, of course, Breanne have ever really gotten the full benefit of my capacity for sharing everything. With everyone else I've kind of hung back in sharing everything. Even here on this blog, I'm not entirely above withholding certain bits of information if it suits my purposes.
If I were entirely being honest with myself, I've always been attracted most to the facets of Toby's personality and history that remind me about myself rather than the differences. I have enough people in my life with whom I get to experience "the other side of life" with. I have enough people I know who I can live vicariously through rather than live their kind of life myself. With Toby it's nice to know someone other than me kind of calls a spade a spade for the exact same reasons I do.
What is not entirely pleasant is when I see the not so appealing aspects of my personality.
Listening to her lack of chatter, hearing nothing coming from her side of the front seat, and seeing on her face the lack of any enthusiasm I saw every complaint people have levied against me when I'm annoyed or unhappy. I retreat. I run away. And I'm not talking about the way Breanne runs away when she has a problem; that's the literal interpretation of what I do figuratively. If you confront Breanne, she'll try to fight you tooth and nail. But if she ever ends up feeling like she's not being heard, she'll run away. That's what she does. I'm different. I'll just shut you off in my head. Or, worse yet, I'll cut off all communication with you. 60-0, that's what Brandy uses to describe my penchant for expressing my interest in the conversation. Some people can fake their interest in a story or an argument; I won't. It's what Toby does too. She doesn't fake interest very well either.
And she wasn't faking it very well once we got to our destination.
"We'll grab the sponge and then you'll show me around, right?"
"That's the plan," she said, walking through the front doors ahead of me.
Was I this hard to deal with for most people? Did it seem to others who were around me when I was in one of my funks that I had a lot to say, but refusing to say it?
I walked inside the store and took up a position on the other side of the aisle where she was looking for the sponges. It didn't take her long to find it, but instead of just picking it up and taking it to the counter, she lingered with it in her hands. I could see her blue eyes focusing in on something else but the green and yellow sponge in her hands. Again, I was tempted to ask that simplest of questions, what was wrong, but something told me she needed to work a few things out in her head before she would be ready to tell me. She's a pretty girl; it rather bothered me to see her so upset and not to be able to do anything about it. It was like watching a turtle on its back, unable to get up, but being prevented at righting it by the double panes of glass surrounding it. In Toby's case the glass surrounding her was a lack of directness she had yet to develop. And in my case, the glass surrounding me was the lack of familiarity the situation entailed. It wasn't my place yet to talk about her problems like we had on the phone. On the phone she had asked for my help eventually, so eventually it became second nature for me to offer advice. But she had yet to ask for my help in real life. Until she did, it didn't matter what I told her. She wasn't going to hear it anyway. It didn't matter if I shouted to the high heavens. It would have never made it through the thick brown mane of hair shielding her ears in the store; it would have never penetrated the thick wall of introspection she had erected around her.
It was my first day in Louisville with Toby and all I could think about was how I wish could be back home. That way I could have called her and asked her what was wrong. She had a lot to say, I knew that much. She just didn't have a way to say it.
That's when it happened.
I watched her pick up her small grey motorola from her bag. I watched her dial a number in. And then I heard and felt my phone ring.
"Hello?" I said.
"It's me. I've got a problem. I need your help, Patrick."
For the first time all night, I watched her mouth fold up into a big smile. I don't know if you've ever known somebody with a smile that's as wide as mile, but that's the only way to describe Toby's mile. It's the kind of smile that makes you feel inferior because your own mouth can't stretch that large and it always makes me feel at least that I could never be quite as happy as she can be. I don't know if it was the smile that did me in, but I indulged her in little game. I spent the next ten minutes in the aisle with her, talking out an issue she apparently felt ill-equipped to discuss in the car with me. The funny thing was once the words started pouring out, they flowed out like a raging river. It was all I could do to interject here and there with the advice I had to give. In fact, the entire time it seemed to me that she the basic gist of how to solve her problem. All she really needed was someone to agree with her, to tell her that she was on the right track.
I heard the echo let go and I feel alright, at least I think so
There we were, standing less than two feet from each other, on our phones. Yet it made more sense to talk on the phone than just out in the open. Even though I was looking at her beautiful, freckled face the entire time, I wasn't concentrating on the voice coming out of her mouth. I was concentrating on the voice coming out of the other end of the phone.
In time we put away the phones. In fact, we talked the whole time in the car on our way to the seafood place we had decided to go for dinner in town. But it took something we were both comfortable with to get the ball rolling. Sometimes having something to say is less important than being comfortable enough to say it. And sometimes it's more important to get the words out there through any means possible than doing something slightly off-kilter in the process.
My only hope is that when I fly out there again this June 13th phones won't be necessary. I'm hoping the next time we spend fifteen minutes buying a solitary sponge, there won't be a phone in sight. The only thing I want to see is the person who reminds me so much about myself.
And, of course, that great smile of hers.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
"Can we buy a sponge first?" she asked as soon as she had gotten into the rented tan Corrolla. I thought to ask what she needed the sponge so urgently so far, but then I thought better of it."Sure."
Toby was dressed in a pinkish shirt with black tiger stripes on it. I remembered that because I thought it was odd that somebody as reserved as she proclaimed to be would wear something so garish out. Sure, she had sent me pictures about what she looked like when she went out, but somehow the pictures were something unreal, something like she was dressing up in costume. Seeing her in person was an entirely different reality.
"I would do it on my own time, but I figured since we'll be out..." her voice trailed off.
As far as first meetings go, it wasn't exactly Romeo and Juliet finding each other across the crowded room, but it was memorable. More than that, it was what I had hoped would happen when I first came to pick her up in front of her parents' house. I didn't want to spend a lot of time going through the motions of introductions or greetings. That's a brand of awkwardness that most of the time I could do without. I couldn't remember if I had imparted this knowledge to young Miss Frisson sometime in the last few months, but whether she picked up on the hint or such was her natural behavior, it was my natural behavior to skip the formalities and to get right into the meat of the matter.
I mean--I was excited to meet her as I'm sure she was to meet me for the first time face-to-face. Yet after talking to her off and on on the phone for the last year, it wasn't like she had to go through the rudimentary biography beforehand. It truly did felt like we had known each other for far longer than the occasion would have accounted for. I've just always found that the surest way to combat nervousness at first encounters is to treat them like they aren't first encounters. In fact, some of the best introductions I've ever had were the ones where I didn't couch it like an introduction at all. From telling people about the nuances of my day to peppering them about the more intimate portions of theirs, I've never gone into a worthwhile friendship treating it as if we were in first throes of getting to know one another. The way I figure it, you're always in the process of getting to know someone. However, you don't have to ever base your whole perspective on this fact. You really should go into every conversation as if you already know enough about the individual in particular to be holding a conversation with them. That's how I treated Toby on that day, that it was like the umpteenth time I've spent time with her even if was technically the first time I ever spent time with her face-to-face.
"Follow this street out and then make a left at the second light," she instructed me solemnly after I asked where we needed to go to.
Even while I was watching the road, out of the corner of my eye I noticed she wasn't entirely there. She's always been naturally reticent, but I was expecting a few more words to be falling from her mouth--small talk or not. I wanted to ask her what was wrong. I wanted to find out and help. But I knew Toby was the kind of person that didn't need to be questioned. She would open up about what was bothering her eventually.
"So what do you need the sponge for?"
"No reason. I was doing the dishes after breakfast this morning and I noticed we needed a new one."
"Really?"
"Yeah, it's a habit. I like to buy a new sponge every two weeks on the dot. Usually I get my mom to do it, but since you're here."
I thought about it for a second before replying.
"Did you actually need the sponge then? Or was it more the two weeks were up?"
"Gosh. I don't know. After two weeks I start to think of the sponge as worn out. I couldn't even tell you if it's still usable."
"Can I tell you something funny, Marion?"
"What."
"I don't even know when the last time I bought a sponge was. I usually come home one day and there's just a new one there. It's kind of like the sponge fairy visits whenever I need a new one."
She attempted to laugh, but the slump to her shoulders and the way her voice had a habit of trailing off told me that her heart just wasn't into the humor of the situation. I had thought that would have gotten a rise out of her. Just the previous week I had told her that a scoop of cookie dough ice cream I had been eating had somehow ended up on the floor. When I had informed her that I had picked it off the dirty kitchen floor and put it back into my glass bowl she practically hung up the phone on me. It took me telling her that the kitchen floor wasn't as dirty as I made it out to be and that I had only dropped a spoonful at most to get her to calm down. Now she took the news that I wasn't exactly the most vigilant sponge monitor in the world with as much disgust as if I'd told her that I had blown my nose.
That's the problem with the meeting someone for the first time and they're not exactly jazzed to see you. You want them to be as excited for the meeting as you are for it, but to them it's more of a routine. Toby wasn't the one who had flown two thousand miles anywhere. She wasn't the one who had to rent a car. She wasn't the one holed up in a Sheraton across the river. She had woken up in the same bed she had woken up in the day before. She had had breakfast in her parents' house like she had the day before. And now she was riding down to the local store and picking up the same kind of sponge she apparently picked up every two weeks. The companion had changed, but she was still in the midst of her routine.
I had the feeling if she hadn't been mired in her own problems, she would have been more considerate of mine. I could forgive her for that. It didn't make dealing with the awkward silences any easier, however. It made for a very quiet few blocks' ride.
On the outside she looked alright--pink tiger shirt aside. But on the inside I couldn't help but wonder what kind of demons she was keeping at bay. For the first time in a long time I realized how maddening it was to have a friend who was naturally secretive. I'd gotten spoiled on Breannie, whose worst problem has always been knowing when to cool her jets. Talking problems out with her came as easily as falling off a log. I knew from day one that getting familiar with Toby's routines would be a wholly different experience. I could even see that in the way she writes. She writes far more in metaphor and imagery than most people I know. She doesn't spell it out for you A-B-C. She forces you to puzzle it out some. And even when she is being forthright she never entirely clues you into every detail. There's always been a part to her that remains under lock and key; there's always been a part she keeps to herself in order to maintain the illusion that nobody can understand all of her.
To be fair, that's always been the part that intrigued me most about her. I'm naturally secretive with most people. There's always been a part of me that feels like nobody understands everything about me. There's always been a manner in which I've held things in because I don't feel like people would want to concern themselves with my problems. Only people like Jina, Brandy, DeAnn, and, of course, Breanne have ever really gotten the full benefit of my capacity for sharing everything. With everyone else I've kind of hung back in sharing everything. Even here on this blog, I'm not entirely above withholding certain bits of information if it suits my purposes.
If I were entirely being honest with myself, I've always been attracted most to the facets of Toby's personality and history that remind me about myself rather than the differences. I have enough people in my life with whom I get to experience "the other side of life" with. I have enough people I know who I can live vicariously through rather than live their kind of life myself. With Toby it's nice to know someone other than me kind of calls a spade a spade for the exact same reasons I do.
What is not entirely pleasant is when I see the not so appealing aspects of my personality.
Listening to her lack of chatter, hearing nothing coming from her side of the front seat, and seeing on her face the lack of any enthusiasm I saw every complaint people have levied against me when I'm annoyed or unhappy. I retreat. I run away. And I'm not talking about the way Breanne runs away when she has a problem; that's the literal interpretation of what I do figuratively. If you confront Breanne, she'll try to fight you tooth and nail. But if she ever ends up feeling like she's not being heard, she'll run away. That's what she does. I'm different. I'll just shut you off in my head. Or, worse yet, I'll cut off all communication with you. 60-0, that's what Brandy uses to describe my penchant for expressing my interest in the conversation. Some people can fake their interest in a story or an argument; I won't. It's what Toby does too. She doesn't fake interest very well either.
And she wasn't faking it very well once we got to our destination.
"We'll grab the sponge and then you'll show me around, right?"
"That's the plan," she said, walking through the front doors ahead of me.
Was I this hard to deal with for most people? Did it seem to others who were around me when I was in one of my funks that I had a lot to say, but refusing to say it?
I walked inside the store and took up a position on the other side of the aisle where she was looking for the sponges. It didn't take her long to find it, but instead of just picking it up and taking it to the counter, she lingered with it in her hands. I could see her blue eyes focusing in on something else but the green and yellow sponge in her hands. Again, I was tempted to ask that simplest of questions, what was wrong, but something told me she needed to work a few things out in her head before she would be ready to tell me. She's a pretty girl; it rather bothered me to see her so upset and not to be able to do anything about it. It was like watching a turtle on its back, unable to get up, but being prevented at righting it by the double panes of glass surrounding it. In Toby's case the glass surrounding her was a lack of directness she had yet to develop. And in my case, the glass surrounding me was the lack of familiarity the situation entailed. It wasn't my place yet to talk about her problems like we had on the phone. On the phone she had asked for my help eventually, so eventually it became second nature for me to offer advice. But she had yet to ask for my help in real life. Until she did, it didn't matter what I told her. She wasn't going to hear it anyway. It didn't matter if I shouted to the high heavens. It would have never made it through the thick brown mane of hair shielding her ears in the store; it would have never penetrated the thick wall of introspection she had erected around her.
It was my first day in Louisville with Toby and all I could think about was how I wish could be back home. That way I could have called her and asked her what was wrong. She had a lot to say, I knew that much. She just didn't have a way to say it.
That's when it happened.
I watched her pick up her small grey motorola from her bag. I watched her dial a number in. And then I heard and felt my phone ring.
"Hello?" I said.
"It's me. I've got a problem. I need your help, Patrick."
For the first time all night, I watched her mouth fold up into a big smile. I don't know if you've ever known somebody with a smile that's as wide as mile, but that's the only way to describe Toby's mile. It's the kind of smile that makes you feel inferior because your own mouth can't stretch that large and it always makes me feel at least that I could never be quite as happy as she can be. I don't know if it was the smile that did me in, but I indulged her in little game. I spent the next ten minutes in the aisle with her, talking out an issue she apparently felt ill-equipped to discuss in the car with me. The funny thing was once the words started pouring out, they flowed out like a raging river. It was all I could do to interject here and there with the advice I had to give. In fact, the entire time it seemed to me that she the basic gist of how to solve her problem. All she really needed was someone to agree with her, to tell her that she was on the right track.
I heard the echo let go and I feel alright, at least I think so
There we were, standing less than two feet from each other, on our phones. Yet it made more sense to talk on the phone than just out in the open. Even though I was looking at her beautiful, freckled face the entire time, I wasn't concentrating on the voice coming out of her mouth. I was concentrating on the voice coming out of the other end of the phone.
In time we put away the phones. In fact, we talked the whole time in the car on our way to the seafood place we had decided to go for dinner in town. But it took something we were both comfortable with to get the ball rolling. Sometimes having something to say is less important than being comfortable enough to say it. And sometimes it's more important to get the words out there through any means possible than doing something slightly off-kilter in the process.
My only hope is that when I fly out there again this June 13th phones won't be necessary. I'm hoping the next time we spend fifteen minutes buying a solitary sponge, there won't be a phone in sight. The only thing I want to see is the person who reminds me so much about myself.
And, of course, that great smile of hers.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
Labels: meaning, Questioning, searching, The Bridges, Toby
posted by mojo shivers @ 1:48 AM
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