Tuesday, July 3, 2007

unless you believe in peter pan

There are so many things I want to say.
If I were to ask you a question, could you promise to answer truthfully and to the best of your knowledge? Would you promise not to evade the question? I am afraid to talk to you, because you will ask me what I mean, or pretend you did not hear, or wait until I tire of the silence and ask about hills. You hurt me with words - the ones you will not say, and the ones you will not hear. You are stone walls and locked doors and closed books; you are riddles and ciphers and poems.
I don't know you. I don't know about you. I want to be your friend. It is such a small thing. It is such a huge thing. Why will you not see how much it means to me?

I am the child here, not you.
It's funny. I say it, and I believe it, and then I feel as though I'm doing something wrong saying it; stealing your thunder, betraying your beliefs. Forgive me, I only know other people in the context of myself. And I only find myself in relation to other people.
Is that how it works for everybody?

I am afraid of words.
They can mean so many things, so many; and yet people pretend communication is the simplest thing in the world. I find it so hard to say the exact thing I mean after thinking for hours and hours, and getting a single perfect sentence out brings so much joy -
How can it mean more to make less sense to more people? How can it mean more to be ambiguous and unclear and interpretable?
How can you not want someone to know what you mean the minute you tell them?
And yet. And yet I write obscure lines in the hope that someone will recognize in the convoluted thought processes something they remember from before.

Do children learn from their mistakes? Do children know when people are not telling them the truth? Are children the ones for whom life is black and white and friendship does not need time?
What does being a child mean to you?
Being a child is wanting to grow up and being an adult is wanting not to.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

come on, grow up. U r still a child