Day 16. We bet there was a story you wanted to tell that didn't line up with any of the prompts. Write it anyway - and use it to write a one or two sentence prompt that others could use to tell a good story of their own.
Love is a powerful thing; it can drive us to act with a kindness or madness that surprises us. Tell us the story of something extraordinary, good or bad, that you did out of love.
I miss those days. Not often, mind you, but we all look back through the nostalgiotron - things were simpler because our worlds were smaller, our wallets lighter, our heads emptier. Drama, booze, and free time were in long supply; everything was the best, the most exciting, life-changing and amazing. We used italics. To describe our feelings.
Anyway. She was my first love, or at least the earliest I can remember. I could tell you stories about her, about us, but those are tales best left for another time. Suffice to say this was my first anniversary with my first real girlfriend. Plus she was Russian, so I had to go big or get bear clawed to death. But what to get her? I had all the youthful passion of a college student and the monetary background of a college student.
Fortunately for me, these were days where drama ran rampant. Before we dated, I was her friend and confidant, even though I'd yearned for her from the moment I drunk-stumbled over her foot in a dorm room. But she didn't feel the same, and I spent the next two semesters John Cusacking it until she came around to my way of thinking.
This meant we had a history. A series of locations and events that were poignant, rich with our brief acquaintance. And that night, armed with a pair of scissors and my natural penchant for skulduggery, I went to them all. Nicked a mug from the restaurant we had our first dinner together. Flowers from the dorm where we met and the houses we lived in while I pitched woo. Water from the Au Bon Pain in the student center where she worked that summer. Sand from the playground where I told her how I felt as the sun rose. And I presented her with my makeshift bouquet, bound with a strip of cloth I'd surreptitiously ripped from the seat of our little nook at the coffee shop where we spent all our time.
We (and by 'we' I mean adults, not 'we' as the Russian and I. Though that 'we' holds, I suppose) don't do these things anymore. We spend our money on restaurants and gifts and chocolates because we don't have the time to hunt down these details. We live lives so complex and busy that we don't remember the little things that make our time with each other so special. We buy our flowers at bodegas on the fly instead of picking them. And that's sad.
The Russian's still one of my best friends, though she's long since moved back to Moscow. She still has those flowers, pressed and dried in the pages of her journal, bookmarked with that strip of material from a cafe that isn't there anymore. And I joke that the most romantic gesture I'll ever come up with was wasted on her.
But it wasn't a waste, was it? Not to those two lovestruck idiots in a shitty apartment in New Brunswick, one year down and a beautiful bright future in front of them.
Love is a powerful thing; it can drive us to act with a kindness or madness that surprises us. Tell us the story of something extraordinary, good or bad, that you did out of love.
I miss those days. Not often, mind you, but we all look back through the nostalgiotron - things were simpler because our worlds were smaller, our wallets lighter, our heads emptier. Drama, booze, and free time were in long supply; everything was the best, the most exciting, life-changing and amazing. We used italics. To describe our feelings.
Anyway. She was my first love, or at least the earliest I can remember. I could tell you stories about her, about us, but those are tales best left for another time. Suffice to say this was my first anniversary with my first real girlfriend. Plus she was Russian, so I had to go big or get bear clawed to death. But what to get her? I had all the youthful passion of a college student and the monetary background of a college student.
Fortunately for me, these were days where drama ran rampant. Before we dated, I was her friend and confidant, even though I'd yearned for her from the moment I drunk-stumbled over her foot in a dorm room. But she didn't feel the same, and I spent the next two semesters John Cusacking it until she came around to my way of thinking.
This meant we had a history. A series of locations and events that were poignant, rich with our brief acquaintance. And that night, armed with a pair of scissors and my natural penchant for skulduggery, I went to them all. Nicked a mug from the restaurant we had our first dinner together. Flowers from the dorm where we met and the houses we lived in while I pitched woo. Water from the Au Bon Pain in the student center where she worked that summer. Sand from the playground where I told her how I felt as the sun rose. And I presented her with my makeshift bouquet, bound with a strip of cloth I'd surreptitiously ripped from the seat of our little nook at the coffee shop where we spent all our time.
We (and by 'we' I mean adults, not 'we' as the Russian and I. Though that 'we' holds, I suppose) don't do these things anymore. We spend our money on restaurants and gifts and chocolates because we don't have the time to hunt down these details. We live lives so complex and busy that we don't remember the little things that make our time with each other so special. We buy our flowers at bodegas on the fly instead of picking them. And that's sad.
The Russian's still one of my best friends, though she's long since moved back to Moscow. She still has those flowers, pressed and dried in the pages of her journal, bookmarked with that strip of material from a cafe that isn't there anymore. And I joke that the most romantic gesture I'll ever come up with was wasted on her.
But it wasn't a waste, was it? Not to those two lovestruck idiots in a shitty apartment in New Brunswick, one year down and a beautiful bright future in front of them.
One of the best Valentine's I ever got was a bag with a ball of yarn, a CD case, my junior prom corsage and some painted pottery animals. Years later, I got pearls, but at that point, all I wanted was to go back to the notes and wildflowers we'd leave tucked under each other's windshield wipers throughout the school day. When we broke up, in a fit of depression (even though I did the breaking up and we are still friends) I threw away the years of dried flowers and notes and pottery animals but kept the pearls. They mean a lot to me, but not as much as those other things, and I probably should've done it the other way around.
ReplyDeleteMaybe. But when you look at the pearls, can't you still see everything else?
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