A little different from my other pieces on here, I have a collection of saved works entitled “You” that I have written about many “you’s” in my life. I write these pieces in order to sort out my feelings about someone and better understand my emotions toward them. Often, what I think of someone initially, isn’t really who they are. And sometimes the subjects for these pieces aren’t really people at all, but only the image of the person with the personality I made up in my head. These pieces are mostly streams of my consciousness and make little to no sense without context, but they’re clarifying for me. They’re sort of like little letters that I would mail to the person or read to their face uninterrupted if it weren’t for my own cowardice. I figured that I would start publishing these here because maybe you all have similar feelings about similar people and maybe you can relish in that with me 🙂
1. I was surprised when it was you I saw at the door.
I mean, in a way, I have always been waiting for you.
Yes, I knew you would come and greet me. My friends had long told me that you existed and that you would be here to take me away or make me cry or something awful and terrific like that. You would take your hat and coat off and set them on the rack. And perhaps you would put your hands in your pockets and watch me from across the foyer.
And I imagined that I would be excited to see you. Or that I would feel, butterflies in the very least.
But what I felt, when you actually appeared, wasn’t that. It was the absence of breath and speech. It was air swirling between us without purpose or direction. It was empty.
You just weren’t what I expected.
Your hand was warm in my cold one, yes, but your eyes were all wrong. And your hair wasn’t done right. And you wore all the wrong clothes. All wrong. But you were there at my door, waiting for me. Yes, it was only me there for you. I was relieved to see you but not excited. Not the way I thought that I would be, don’t you see that?
And you! Relieved to see me too, but not surprised. The expression on your face was downright bored. You wore no hat but you adjusted the watch on your hand. Had you been waiting for the right moment to turn and leave? Had you preferred the abyss to me?
Can’t you see that I’m not what you expected either?
But there was hope in my chest for the future. Hope that time would be slow and that we would grow in, rather than up. Perhaps we still can.
Chena Is Home 