Each morning, after meeting up with Freckles and/or The Doctor for our daily car pool, and passing the other commuters (who, after many years of commuting, I have begun to recognize, sadly), and dealing with all the road rage and construction, and silently pretending that all the roadkill doesn’t bother me, I exit the interstate onto the access road that winds its way down an unending hill into the depressing granite town in which we work, and I peak my head around the off-ramp corner to see the spray-painted message that has been waiting for me on the interstate overpass bridge each and every weekday of my career: “Have I told you lately…”
The first day I saw this message, I understandably expected the second half to be spray-painted onto the second overpass bridge, but I was unpleasantly surprised to find the conclusion missing. As I’m sure most other drivers have done, I wondered aloud a number of different questions: What’s the second half of the message? Is it what I thought it was going to be? Is what I thought it was going to be any different from what everyone else thought it would be? Did the graffitist suffer heartache after spray-painting the first bridge and before marking the second one? Did he/she get arrested for vandalism? Why hasn’t it been erased after all this time?
In the (too many) number of years that I’ve been commuting to this job, I’ve had ample time to concoct my own story behind the “Have I told you lately…” graffiti. The abridged story that I’ve come up with goes something like this: a 17 year old boy, in love for the first time in his life, having decided to tell the world and his love of this love, spray painted the first half of the message onto the bridge. After marking the last of the ellipses, he slipped and fell to the ground, and just as he stood to shake off the gravel and shock that accompanies such a painful but survivable fall, a car heading under the overpass plowed into him; a collision that ultimately killed him. His girlfriend, on her way home in tears after cheating on her first love, climbed out of her car, fell to the ground next to her dying boyfriend, and though she tried to tell him one last time of her love, she could not find the words through her tears of guilt. And so, in yet another fictional poetic (read: ironic) twist for which I am infamous (subconsciously inspired by my first girlfriend in high school), both the girl’s and the boy’s words of love remained unspoken.
This story that I’ve created in my head is a product of the imagination-inspiring past-time of people-watching, a game that Montana Girl, Sarah the L, and I have perfected over the years. The object of the game is basically to come up with a back story for anyone and everyone who crosses your path. The more random and troubling the story, the better the entertainment value. Until I started contemplating how to write this blog entry, I never really understood why I liked the people-watching game so much. And then it hit me.
As anyone who knows me will tell you, I don’t deal well with the unknown. Try to slip an inside joke by me, try to keep a secret from me, whisper something to someone else in my presence, tell me “I’ll tell you later,” and all I will do is make it my life mission to find out what I’m missing. I think this stems from my own insecurities (ie, my fear of being left out or isolated) and try as I might to obsess a little less, and relax a little more, I can’t. And thanks to another one of my insecurities (ie, my fear of rejection), in the absence of a certain truth, I react in the worst possible way: I invent my own idea of the truth that is far worse than any reality I’ll ever experience in my life. As you can imagine, in the past, whenever I’ve entered into a new relationship where uncertainty is always part of my daily diet, my insecurities have always stood guard with their knees shaking in front of my emotions, which brings me ever so transparently to the next paragraph; the one for which you’ve all been waiting.
Freckles and I have been spending quite a bit of time together the last few weeks and, as I’m sure you all would have been able to guess had I asked you to guess, that’s a bit of an understatement. Evidently, I wasn’t lying in my previous posting when I said I wouldn’t stand a chance in her 2-hours-a-day presence. It didn’t take long for either of us to realize that something special was developing between us and it didn’t take long after that for both of us to say something about it. We don’t know each other very well – only as well as a handful of weeks could possibly allow – but based on what I’ve discovered, I’ve learned that I want to know more.
I like Freckles. Among a million other unnamed positive traits, I like her intelligence, her insecurities, her humor, her stubbornness, her loyalty, her humbleness, her beauty, her fragility, her sincerity, and her purity. I think, above all else, though, what I find most endearing in her is that she has the same fears and questions that I have. She does not take me lightly and from this, I whole-heartedly believe that she never will. And the benefit to a relationship begun with both people involved eyeing potential heartache like a cub’s mother eyes a wolf a mile away, is that although we both feel drawn to each other, I get the sense that we’re both willing to go at a much slower pace than the one to which I’m accustomed.
It’s early yet, I know, and there are a number of unanswered questions and unfinished thoughts spray-painted in a clear and bold font on the side of a bridge, but though, from time to time, our imaginations and insecurities may get the best of our respective fears of heartache and lead us to answer those questions and finish those thoughts with irrational conclusions, I’m finding sweet solace in the fact that each new day that I spend with Freckles brings with it one more extraordinary reason to stay with her.
And then: you close your eyes, hope for the best, and jump.
Benchly'sword 