Three Stories
My childhood bedroom had a tall window that opened out to the street, shielded by an unkempt evergreen bush. After everyone in the house had fallen asleep, I’d occasionally slide the window open and shimmy between the bush and the house, leaving a hairpin opening in the frame for my return.
This was not to run away, or to meet up with friends, or for any of the usual youthful rebellion. I just wanted to walk. Sometimes I would go barefoot, toeing into the cracked cement of the pavement. I mapped out the veins of my neighborhood this way, coursing through capillaries and arteries.
We had outside cats growing up. I named mine Trainey, honoring my early love of rail transport; my sister named hers Sparkles, perhaps accessing more sensible pet-naming conventions. Trainey was once lost for three days and found in a neighbor’s crawl space with a mangled tail. I cried and cried.
What do outside cats do? I guess the term “outside cat” feels redundant to the cat: to be a cat is to be (or should be, to be) outside. I imagine them around the neighborhood, patrolling their paths, passively curious. The goal is to be a cat, and with this freedom it is easily achieved.
To be a human, too, is the goal. The smell of those nights is still vivid - Bay Area fog slowly condensing as dew, inch by inch on each leaf. I’d tease open the hairpin crack and return to my twin bed, always more comfortable than I’d left it.
Two recent events: I took the notary exam for work and I got a new passport. Both involve government agencies, attestations, waiting for mail. But they’re also united in their ability to bring forth a source of great shame for me: each require my signature for execution.
At first, I remember celebrating the simplicity of my signature. First initial, last name, all lowercase; no more than a continuum of covert loops. I etched my mark for my first ID, aping a doctor or some other professional with too little time to waste writing their name. Then came shame. Permanently, inherently illegible. Dread came with each receipt at a dinner out with friends, looming over the touchscreen at the grocery store checkout, tailing me to every renewal appointment at the DMV.
Things needed to change. Copious free time at work allowed me to create a new signature: G and L as stately capitals, intertwined by the hook of the former, finished with my two familiar lowercase E’s. I gazed over my work. The new mark repeated over and over, perfected on a legal pad. This was a signature that someone in their late twenties could be proud of, one that could guide them into their fourth decade with an air of professionalism.
Our too-small exam tables already set, bubble sheets awaiting our knowledge of New York State Notary Public License Law. The proctor warns us to complete the Personal Information section in its entirety. Can you just “change” your signature? Who cross reference these things? The proctor stabs at the signature field on my sheet with a finger and a glare, and helpfully reminds everyone how Albany will reject our test if any detail is amiss.
24-year-old Gabe and his goofy smile on my driver’s license, required for exam submission. The black mark laid beneath him. I scrawled the loops. My passport receives the same treatment. I hold out hope that my thirties bring me to peace with this vestige of a younger me.
I was reading at the park the other day and I saw a man pulling his dog along. The little dog, stout and resolute, had sniffed the grass while the man, the other dog he was holding, the woman he was with, and the baby stroller she was carting paused. When the man decided it was time to go, each tug brought the dog’s collar higher, a turtle neck turning up his ears. Eventually, he gave up and handed off the leash to the woman, to whom the dog acquiesced. They moved along.
The book I was reading was Runaway by Alice Munro. In the eponymous story, a character remarks that nothing that she thinks is worth writing about seems worthwhile to her poet husband. I catch myself thinking this way about myself constantly: what in the moment seems beautiful or significant falls flat when I try to capture it, like a firefly killed in the jar.
Everything I try to contain in the jar seems to elude me. I recently stopped seeing someone, and I find it hard to find the words for what occurred. Can I lay any claim to the “breakup” if I could barely express what came before it, what I felt about it? Thus the feelings swirl, evading definition and resolution.
That dog brought me such joy, but not raucous, jubilant joy. Quiet joy that glows gently, nesting somewhere hard to place or retrieve. Sometimes I feel like my words limit my experience of both the beauty and the tragedy of life. I’m trying to break through that here.