Yes, everyone has that, it’s called memory…
I never really even had a good Valentine’s Day with my asshole ex (who I have taken to calling “The Idiot Man-Boy”). He basically looked at the whole thing as “I take you out, then I get sex, hooray.” He’d get me the most traditional gift he could muster. He’d get me red roses, despite my dislike of red roses. Not really dislike, but more…I’d have preferred him getting me something tropical, like Asiatic Lillies or something. But then again, he was so all about tradition…UGH. It wasn’t about us celebrating in a way that made us happy, it was about celebrating in a way everyone else would look at and think “wow, those two are REALLY normal. Nothing weird about them at all. Nope.”
I think it was his obsession with being normal that destroyed me. My friends were all too weird for him. They were too into weird things, like…I dunno, thinking? They didn’t all have dreams of white picket fences and church bake sales in their future. Well, I think we did have dreams of hot gluing plastic farm animals to white picket fences and crashing a church bake sale to hand out pamphlets about Beakism (Become a Beaknik! Or don’t…we’re really sort of indifferent…you guys got any beer? Oh! Sweet! Brownies!). And I say “we” there because, as much as he hated to admit it, I wanted weird and out there and kooky. Yes, I did just say “kooky.”
And all he wanted was to be able to look respectable. To be NORMAL. But he wasn’t normal and you could see it in bits and pieces, but he had to keep up appearences and I never totally understood why. Like, I could understand for work functions and for the judo people, but I never understood why he wouldn’t let himself be himself when nobody else was around.
To tell the truth, I think The Idiot Man-Boy’s so far in the closet he’s found Narnia. And that’s not an insult, it’s an observation that makes me sad. It makes me sad that he can’t confront himself about who he is and let himself be himself and be happy with himself because it will upset his mother and father or cause his brother to make fun of him. Everyone back home in his small town (that he’s moved back to since breaking up with me…) would KNOW there was something different about him and that would be bad. The man is 27 years old and he’s still such a fucking CHILD. And that’s funny and sad at the same time.
Granted, I’m 24 and I’m still a fucking child in a lot of ways. But I don’t run away from who I am. I meet myself head on these days because I don’t want to have to live ashamed with myself and constantly thinking “what if somebody finds out about me?” For a long time I ran away from myself and the person I was and the person I wanted to be because it wasn’t “acceptable” or “normal.”
Normal is overrated. Long live the freaks.
