History is the greatest thing. I love my own personal history. Sometimes, I just look back at it and go ‘Wow, look at that. Isn’t that just a thing?’ Because you know, it happened and now it’s gone and you’re here right now because of it.
That probably made no sense at all.
Sometimes, there are just silly things that make me in love with it all. The other night, Esteban and I were lying in bed, doing that nauseating couple thing where we’re all snuggly-wuggly and just lying there, almost asleep like two baby birds in a nest fluffed with down, and he had just warned me to not bite him (which I do on occasion. I’m a biter. I can’t even help myself. If I really really like you, I might just bite you. But it’s just a love bite. Really. Love hurts sometimes.) and then I tickled his ribs and he did this weird undulating thing, which he then described as his Dolph Lundgren maneuver. And I was flummoxed, so I said ‘Dolph Lundgren? Like’ HeMan?’ No, no, it was a dolphin maneuver. Because that made so much more sense. So I asked him if he went to school to be so dorky or if it just came natural, to which he replied that he was a class 12 dork with a plus-twelve ability to spaz out and a magical ring of regeekeration.
Sexiest man alive, non?
What a crime it would be to forget that, though. What an absolute crime. Last night I had one of those few rare evenings where I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow or next week or next year or why I wasn’t born a trust fund baby or why I haven’t seen Finding Nemo yet (because those pelicans? My god, I almost stroked out from laughter during the previews. Esteban was mortified at my ability to be absolutely destroyed by a fart joke, particularly one combined with fish.). And the house was relatively clean and the floor all nice and shiny and wooden and looking as though it has always belonged in this house and we simply reunited it. And even though we have yet to put the moldings in and even though there was a pot of gnocchi slowly turning to Elmer’s glue in the kitchen, it just felt great to sit in the living room with the front door open and the full screen letting soft breezes fluff the belly fur of the cat as she luxuriates in the new rug in the middle of the floor. I don’t have those moments very often. Maybe only four or five times a year, where I am completely living in this moment and this place. And I think I miss a lot of stuff because my brain is going about four hundred miles a minute and life turns into a Monet at such speeds.
Like, I don’t want to forget a parking lot full of school buses I saw today, all stowed away for summer vacation. They looked like a field of buttercups. Or the comfy loose clothing of a developmentally disabled man who was waiting for a bus at lunch. He was singing to himself in baggy khakis and a denim jacket, looking for all the world like a Gap ad complete with soundtrack he made up inside his head. Because he made me happy.
Or the old iron doorknobs on the house we used to live in, the way they creaked, the way they were smooth like cobblestones, the way they were so perfect that I always wanted them to be more than just doorknobs, wanted them to rise up beyond their pedestrian occupations and go on to be place settings, fishing lures, saddle horns, sculptures. I want to remember the smell of sulfur as I lit a match at Evensong in St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the very room where Princess Diana’s body would lie in state two months later. I want to remember the eight year old boys in starched white collars that looked like coffee filters, their mouths in perfect Os as they filled with their tiny crystal voices a space large enough to fit God. I want to remember the noise Mo used to make when she was six, when she was laughing so hard that drool was coming out of her mouth, a sort of ‘Heeeeeeeeeeee’ followed by a slurp. I want to remember the smell of geraniums after a thunderstorm. I shouldn’t have spent the entire trip to Door County last summer thinking about the next week at work. I should have paid attention to how I was eating Queen Anne cherries and spitting the pits out the window and how it was raining and cold and we ate Swedish pancakes with lingonberries at the place with goats on the roof and how I ran into the English store to get scores of Hobnobs and how the red and white awnings over the hotdog place in Ephraim were beaded up with water and how I took my finger as I walked beside it and listened to the droplets go vit vit vit vit vit.
Last night, right after the Dolph Lundgren maneuver, Esteban started talking about 80’s music and then I realized that the first time in something like forever I didn’t have a song stuck in my head. Not a one. I made him stop talking and listened to the quiet inside my skull. It was cavernous. It was deafening.
‘I don’t have a song in my head.’ I said.
‘Wow. Really? Nothing?’ He asked, incredulous.
I was too. ‘Wow. No. Nothing. I think’ I think I’m frightened. It’s really weird.’
He promptly started singing Eddie Murphy’s ‘Party All The Time’, which remedied the situation. I thanked him, particularly since I already spent the entirety of 1986 with that fucking song stuck in my head. He giggled.
So I bit him.
