"I Laugh to Myself, It Gives Me Hope"

I've been thinking. I've been thinking that a lot of people know me, they know bits and pieces and assemble them and get a complete me out of the mix, filling in with their own perceptions and understandings and ideas of how things should work. I don't even know how that all works. I do the filling in by watching other people, but I know people who ask questions or bond over watching football or exchanging CDs or making dinner or complaining about stupid people or reading each others' blogs or stealing shopping carts or philosophizing on a riverbank or watching others sleep or flipping coins or living together or feeding the ducks or getting into fistfights or racing through raindrops or playing So Tell Me Something or reading theories or going on road trips or digging ditches or counting stars or analyzing dreams or choosing at complete random. That was a long sentence. I'll wait while you reread it and absorb everything. Come back when you're ready.

All done? Fabulous. As I was saying, there are lots of gaps to fill in. And when you ask me how I am and I say, "Fine," and go on discussing other things, I think those gaps are extraordinarily hard to fill.

We all wear masks in our interactions. I don't think it's always from a lack of trust. We're just called upon to play different roles; a mother, a son, a friend, a lover, a leader, a hope-holder, a heartbreaker, a perfect child, a shadow, an enemy. These roles call for specific dialogues, and to keep things running smoothly, well, emotional honesty can get in the way. What would happen if, for every aquaintance who asked how I was, I splurged into a full account of everything?

What also happens if your role becomes to be happy? If you are supposed to be strong and never, ever break? From great expectations can come great things, and we expand to fit the roles we have been given to take. And so I took mine, and I didn't really talk about how I felt. If you believe in something hard enough, it happens, and I found my stability in pretending, finding out how happy I could be because I NEEDED to be happy.

I'm still planning on writing the Great American Novel. I just think it will surprise people what they read in it, if they know me well enough to read between my lines of prose. Life is far worse and far, far better than they expect it to be. And someday... someday, I will bring back the agora.