Except she wasn’t like That at all. She just wasn’t.
She was so many things other than That, so many other things that she knew, she knew knew knew, if other people knew they would think about her, and things, more than once. Upon knowing, they would shake some sort of previous image, that prior opinion, out of their heads, and they would instead replace it with all the good things she knew lay inside of her somewhere, and them, deep and soft. She was soft. At least, sometimes she felt soft. And delicate, like if someone hugged her, she might cry.
But she still needed to explore all the reasons to show herself that she wasn’t like That. Not the least bit, that had been a mistake, she had been a different person, on an alien (yet identical) planet, or an actor playing a role. She wasn’t like that. But how to show this, these proofs of her otherness? She pondered.
Not one to talk about herself, but rather preferring her thoughts and feelings, she decided to do something that she rarely did: she opened herself up, much wider than the pages of any book, much more revealing than any best-selling tell-all, and she recounted all the feelings she got from the otherness that was herself.
She wrote:
It makes me happy to read fortunes; you know, the ones from those cookies that you can get at any Chinese place. Sometimes, for some people, they don’t relate at all. But somehow, the universe aligns to create a fortune that makes me see how people can believe in religion, in horoscopes, in communicators of the dead. Because sometimes a situation arrives in your hands that seems so perfectly planned out, that you can’t help but believe, that in such an impure and chaotic world, in a place where things are happening, good and bad, simultaneously, and sometimes far too complex for us to fathom or explain, in the middle of all of that there is this fortune, that says…well anyway, it just seems perfect.
To go from one extreme to the next in anything in life is to take the easy route. That may seem far-fetched, but thinking of these things satiates my need to ponder. By jumping from a farmer in a third world country, toiling away to create a life for his wife, children, and extended family, to the head of some swanky private law practice in New York City, looking out onto the street at the hustle and bustle that he knows exists and churns out business for him, is to look at two seemingly incomparable things. So the easy thing, then, would be to say, "These two people are different. They are in no way alike." That is easy. But what about the long route, all of the steps and people and experiences along the way, that separate these two people? What about the struggling factory workers, the stay-at-home moms, the career mom, balancing work and kids, the fledgling plaster craft shop owner, me, my old microeconomics teacher, doctors, musicians, LIFE.
This isn’t an ode to anything. It’s not an explanation, a comparison, a lecture. It’s my thought process. And I’m thinking, that if the average person can’t connect the farmer and the businessman, if they can’t find any similarities that they share, any emotions or experiences or ties, than how in the world are we supposed to find solutions for what people deem the real problems of our world? Global warming, an unbridled and (sometimes) misunderstood fear of terrorism, the lack of interest in the way a government functions, people’s obsession with the elite, with status, with sexuality.
I just wonder, is all. These things that I think, they make me feel small, and unknowledgeable. They make me feel as though I’ll never be able to fully research and understand all of the answers to all of the questions that I have about things in life. That worries me, frustrates me, angers me. Sometimes, I hear a song for the first time on a friends Ipod, something I happen to like a lot, that I’ve never heard before. But instead of simply enjoying it, I think about the fact that there are millions of songs, similar or not, existing and playing and pulsating in some place, that I will never get the chance to hear. Should I be okay with this? Is it wrong to feel as though, by acknowledging this gap that I won’t ever be able to make up for, I am losing something?
Very recently, I opened a fortune cookie up alongside my friend, who was doing the same. Hers read, "You will get a great deal on a major purchase." Mine said, "You find beauty in ordinary things. Do not lose this ability."
Have I lost it already? Or am I simply just beginning to unearth it now?
She doesn’t know. She just knows that she isn’t like That, she will always be something other than That; she decides that even if she spends minutes and hours and days and years, she will prove to herself that she is not like That. Not simply for that reason per say–but to build a collection, of all the things she finds along the way, looking, digging, prying. She hopes she will find things.
She doesn’t know. That’s just what she wonders.