What I Want 2.0

Prompt: (Go outside, then blog) And I want you to be real honest with yourself. Don’t listen to the voices in your head..don’t listen to the pressure you feel from either yourself, your parents, your friends, or any other source. I want you to listen to your heart. To truly listen to your heart. And then after you have spent time with yourself...I want you to go back inside and write. Write about it. Write about your dreams, your fears. Write about whatever tugs at your heartstrings. Just write.

I sat down with myself today to discuss the possibility that I’m focusing too much on introspection.

I am sick of her and her sympathetic expressions, her quiet condemnations.

She smiles at me and says, “Perhaps you do think too much. If you thought less, well, if you regulated what you thought about…” She leans over and pulls the mirror out of her purse and hands it to me. “We could be better.”

I see in it my reflection. “Here,” she says, pointing, “these parts are not quite right.”  She flips open her notepad and begins to write, listing fixes, “Watch fewer chick flicks, memorize a chapter of scripture every week, develop more friendships, try harder in cross country, do more community service…”

I think about lying on the floor of an art museum. I think about three year olds. I think about reading Oedipus the King while sitting in the ruin of a Greek theatre. I think about ice cream, and hymns, and really, really big trees. I think about my dad and how we dance around the family room singing Donovan songs, belting out phrases like, “Antediluvian Kings.”

She hands me her list. “God will just LOVE this, and I know we can do it!”

“Like hell we can.”

I touch the corner of her list to the end of my cigarette.