Ellipses

The best times are the simplest: leaning towards each other over the counter, teasing and being teased by Nora. Sprawling out on the couch with a bowl of white cheddar popcorn, talking about books for hours, piling up phone bills. Him catching me as I walk down the hallway. Playing pranks on Peter and getting winked at by Nora. Sitting in the back row of the theater in Boston and mocking the chick flicks and pointing out the impossibilities of the action pictures. Watching him roll his eyes through classes and the feel of his arm around my waist as we cross Comm Ave.

Debating the relative merits of authors and then thrilling to discover the ones we agree about completely. Holding the phone to my ear till it starts to ache because we’re talking about ideas late into the night and I’m surprising myself, stumbling my way—prompted by him—into really figuring out what I believe. Those rare moments when he laughs and the even rarer ones when he lets me catch a glimpse of his life before Boston. The moments when he reveals the softness he hides and I tease and it all ends with a kiss and contentment.

I want it to last forever.

I’m scared to death because I know it won’t.

Colon

I erupt finally, and I get the feeling he’s hiding a grin, “Why don’t you just make me a list of all the things you think are lame and then you’ll never have to tell them to me again!”
He smiles that half smile that used to infuriate me (and if I’m honest, sometimes still does, even if I love it more often than not, despite its cliché) and stomp off, leaving him to his extended family.
When I check the mail on the way into the house that afternoon, on top of the new issue of my Rolling Stone, and a profusion of junk mail, there’s an unsealed envelope.
I sit down on the stoop and open it, unfolding five pages of ragged-edged notebook paper.
Lame Things the top of the first page is labeled, and I can’t help but laugh out loud:

1. Christopher Self

Number two is small towns. Number seventeen is Ayn Rand. Number twenty-six reads, Professional racecar drivers.
Four pages of paper are covered on one side. It’s college ruled paper, thirty-two lines to a page, four pages, so that’s one hundred and twenty-eight things he thinks are lame. I’m not surprised. I roll my eyes and laugh again as I see what’s crammed into the bottom margin of the fourth page:

And that’s just offhand.

But I catch my breath at the fifth page. Things That Aren’t Lame:
1. Books

6. Emily

I know that Dad still doesn’t like him. Yes, he was rude to him the first time they met, but I would have thought that of anyone Dad would understand the need to protect yourself through words. But being glib isn’t the best way to get on Dad’s good side, and when Dad finally tells me exactly what he said, I realize that his words must have seemed designed to alienate himself from Dad from the first.
But he is caustic and sometimes even cruel to everyone else. And I don’t understand why, because with me he’s so…well, sweet isn’t the right word, but even though I spend more time than I probably should mulling over it, rejecting this word and that, it’s as close as I can get.

I ask him why on a regular basis, but I never get a real answer.

Hyphen

Other than that one time with the 2,507 miles (his front step to mine, a moment I replay again and again), he never talks about the future. I tell him about working in D.C. someday, about being a speechwriter. I tell him about all the places I want to visit and the people I want to meet. I even admit that one day—a long time from now—I want the total package—the husband, the kids, the house (but probably not the minivan, because I can’t imagine any child of mine that would want to play soccer).

He never talks about the future at all. He barely likes to plan for next weekend, much less talk about ten years from now. I’m not sure whether it’s fear or apathy or just that he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, but no matter how I push him, I can’t get him to even hint at anything he might be thinking.

To appease me, he tells me long lists of books he’s planning on reading someday, and it does—for a little while. But that isn’t enough. I tell him that he could do or be anything he wants to be or do. He says, “Thanks, Mom,” but I know his mom never told him that. But I know that if he would just try, just invest in something other than reading every book ever written and annoying his father—he would be unstoppable.

I don’t lie to myself; it bothers me that he doesn’t dream, doesn’t have any sort of ambition. I appreciate that he seems to believe that I can do whatever I want, but I want to be equal.

Parentheses

Books start disappearing from my shelves, but I’m not worried. They’re always returned soon—usually the next day, though how he can be with the family he’s visiting and manage to read Housekeeping all in one day is beyond me—with notes scribbled in the margins, and I smile.

Some books have more notes than others—Dubliners has nearly as many notes in the margins as the text of the story itself, while my Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats has only a scattered few, as though Keats has said (almost) everything that needs to be said.

The first time I think that maybe I love him (love is an awfully big word, one of the few I’m hesitant to apply too freely) is when my copy of On the Road reappears mysteriously on my pillow, and there’s not a single note in it. I pore over every single page, flipping through slowly, sure I’m missing something. Finally, I note something scrawled in the corner of the last flyleaf: Really, what could I say?

He is the whole world.. He’s adventure and books I never would have thought of reading and movies I would never watch and ways of looking at things that I couldn’t have imagined. Not everybody sees what I see. And maybe he’s the bad boy, but he’s going to be a good man, or maybe already is.

Maybe he’s better than me.

Quotation Marks

I like the way he says my name, rolling the syllables around on his tongue. He knows the weight of every word, but when he says this one, I feel as though it has more weight or meaning than any other word in the world.
I have a lot of dreams, more than the average person. And I’m smarter, perhaps, then most. I don’t like to draw attention to all that, but I know it’s true. But even so, I know that I’m not the most meaningful thing in the world, not the most important person, not perfect or the center of the universe.

But when he says my name, I am.

Exclamation Point

After running in the rain, Sarah develops a crush on him, and I am giddy over all the teasing I get to do. I spend time thinking of new quips to make—things about his “crazy” clothes and how he and Sarah are a perfect couple since he almost never talks and she does nothing but.
He grumbles and snarks about my future in standup and I flit around him, chattering and laughing—this is way too much fun to pass up (I’m not friends with Leah for nothing). The one that makes him maddest is the one about how he’ll be related to Peter—all those holidays and family reunions. He growls, then kisses me to shut me up, and I can’t complain or tease at all, because I can’t catch my breath.

Asterisk

Looking back, it seems inevitable, as though I knew from the first time he entered my room and trailed his eyes over my books with a sort of reverence that belied his caustic comment that we were meant to be together. I’m not the type to say things like that; I’m much too practical to believe in love at first sight. And I’ve never liked the idea of some soul mate created for you before time began, that there’s just one person you could ever be with and you’ll never be happy with anyone else and you don’t have any choice in the matter. I believe in making my own choices.
But still, if I believe in destiny at all (and I’m not sure that I do), I would believe that the notes in the margins of a book, a kiss in the rain, an afternoon on Main Street, a quarter behind my ear, a record store in Boston, and a sail on the harbor were all conspiring against me and adding up to something like fate.

Brackets

I love words so much they all come out in a jumble (at least once I get to know someone and can trust them with my riches); I cannot get enough of them. I can remember being with Grandma, just talking. I cannot think of the words, just the rise and fall of her voice; it felt like home.

Words are much too precious for him to use as freely as I do; I know that he’s never understood how I can talk and talk, stringing words together in long chains that trip up anyone else but bind me to the world, and I never can explain it to him. The verbal thing comes and goes, he says, but love for words is as much a part of him as it is of me.

When I talk with Nora, bandying words back and forth (likened to a tennis match), others would watch us, chagrined. He catches most of what’s going on—all the books, most of the movies, the current events, even the history. It’s the really bad TV that trips him up (he isn’t one for staying up till all hours of the night to catch reruns of “The Brady Bunch Variety Hour”), but that’s all right. Nobody’s perfect.

I wait patiently for each word as he doles them out like a miser. Most of them are everyday, monosyllables, but they’re occasionally punctuated with words that mean something, words that gleam and are just exactly right (There is no such thing as an exact synonym, he grumpily quotes Katherine Anne Porter one day and he doesn’t understand why I can’t stop smiling). But never for show or to impress me or anyone else: only when he’s trying to make a point.

We meet in the middle, and it all works out.