Alone With My Thoughts
It’s not easy to be alone.
Sometimes, I get an almost animalistic desire to hide under my desk when I’m the only one in a room, in case someone else walks in. If another person enters the room, it would just be the two of us — and I would feel defenseless. I would feel that I couldn’t be alone with my silliest thoughts.
I feel like I never have enough to say to everyone else — but that’s because I’ve spent so much time daydreaming, reviewing my memories, isolating — and sometimes isolated by — my own thoughts.
It’s hard to see myself in the present, but I can see myself most clearly when I look to the past. Even when I recall my most embarrassing moments, I see my past self and I recognize her.
I recognize me, in the way I’ve chosen to memorize myself.
I look in the mirror and I make faces at the woman I see. I look like someone Miguel de Cervantes would’ve written about. It’s all in my expression. I have the look of a medieval Mediterranean woman, slightly pained from all of the siestas I’ve missed.
When those ancestors left Spain and then left Europe — the folks on our distant Andalusian branch — they probably didn’t anticipate the idea of life in such a different country. Estados Unidos and una familia de clase trabajadora and Kentucky would’ve meant absolutely nothing to them.
But hundreds of years later, life is different. This was modern life in America. This was the era of the dot-com bubble, right before the patriotic paranoia of the early 2000s. I would spend afternoons at my grandmother’s house, where I would feast on Pringles and sliced apples and the Nutty Buddy bars she’d picked up at Family Dollar. I would watch reruns of Password and The Newlywed Game on the Game Show Network. I would sit outside and read, too, but I had to spend rainy afternoons and colder days indoors. So I would park myself in the living room for hours at a time, right across from the TV, where I sat under the watchful eye of Pinkie and The Blue Boy.
I remember finding out that these portraits were painted by two different people, at least twenty years apart, but that they were often sold together as prints. The people in the paintings were united by their similarities, even though these people were born in different parts of the world.
The girl in pink and the boy in blue were quite the pair — not really similar, not truly different, but united by a loose sense of familiarity.
Complementary. That’s what they are, in relation to each other.
Pink and blue blended together make purple— lavender, mauve, mulberry. For weeks, I had wanted to write an essay about the purple hues of my tween and teen years — the plum-colored lipstain I wore in seventh grade, the lilac AZLyrics pages for songs like “Fluorescent Adolescent” and “Time To Pretend,” and the deeper indigos of Roku City, which make it seem like a house is emitting neon fumes, if you happen to be standing in the driveway, waiting for a friend to come outside.
I never get much farther than this. I have the germ of an idea, but I’m not sure what I really want to say — just that I want to describe something that’s already passed us by. I want to describe this thing, but I realize that I don’t have a firm point to make. I just want to reminisce. I just want to memorialize a time when everything seemed easier.
I never want to forget the earliest parts of myself.
