Sarah Joy

I’m sitting in a building on 5th Avenue that I have never been in before, although I have passed it about a hundred million times, listening to carolers sing of Christmas and I am struck by the stagnant way of things. I ride by this building on the MAX five days a week and never gave a thought to sit inside, to people watch out the window. I ride by and I go home where things are never changing, the laundry always needs to get done.

He’s boring he tells me. This boyfriend of mine. I scoff at his remark, after all it was he who took me to all the gardens with my fancy camera lens so I could get the good pictures. It was he who took me on those painful 30 mile bike rides to show me parts of the city I had never seen before. It was he who showed me his secret breakfast places and where the best BBQ in town could be found. Boring? No, just stuck.

We talk up a lot of plans but then never do them. Instead we go where it’s safe, the movies, that hole in the wall breakfast place, the farmer’s market. We talk a big game but we fall into our familiar territories. So he thinks he boring and he isn’t, we just never stray.

This wasn’t even supposed to be about him, but I guess in a way everything I write is at some point or another. It’s funny how I always see things so differently then he does about himself. I got mad at him because he lost he badge somewhere in the apartment. Not mad that he lost it but mad that he was making a big deal about it when I knew we’d find it. We always do. But I get the same way when I can’t find what I need and he’s there telling me to knock it off. We never see these silly things in ourselves but we can spot it a mile away in each other. It makes me laugh. In twenty years he will still be telling me to knock it off. I will always over dramatize losing things.

Every now and then it becomes easier to not blog than to blog. I think about quitting more often then not during those periods. This becomes a place of burden, a place where I can’t share everything. I promised him I wouldn’t fight with him through writing, it’s so easy to be petty and back handed when you don’t have to face the person. Although we never fight for long, I think we’d be over it before I finished a post. He’s practically given up, although he keeps telling me he has several posts “in the works.”

I think about leaving, joining the living world where the air is cold and my toes are frozen but yet I keep coming back here. Always at the oddest of times too. It’s not that I even have anything to say, for clearly I don’t, but rather because it’s a part of me. A part of me I can’t share with everyone else but rather with you, the people do this and the people understand it. Not that this isn’t any less real, but it is somehow because I chose to share these pieces of myself, but you never know which pieces and how real those pieces are. Until my boyfriend asks me if I really do count stairs. Yes I really do.

So I think I’ll take a picture of the poinsettias and be happy in this day. It’s a cold, bright, winter day and I have work later but carolers were singing and the I got write. My toes are still frozen, I wonder sometimes if they will stay that way until spring and like the bears come out of hibernation and I will have full use of my feet once more.

I’m not leaving, I never was. It’s just always curious how you think about it but never do. I’d miss this too much, no matter how long I’m gone I will always come back with rambling posts and odd little quips of myself.