I tried to make plans with friends for the weekend, but none panned out. Before I entered into a panic, I asked my husband out to an early movie. We saw Inception at the Legacy Place cinema in Dedham, MA. We sat in the luxury level and spent a fortune on seats and food, but it was a great experience (especially if you don’t do it too often, it was quite special). Afterwards, I beat my fear of rejection and I asked him if he wanted to go to Barnes & Noble with me. I love going there to browse. I usually walk out with a brand new idea and excitement build-up. To my surprise, he said yes! We stopped by the house to pick up his computer, and he sat at the Starbucks doing his thing while I lost myself in the sea of books, or, like I like to call them, “other brains.”
Just when I thought I would not find a new idea, and was ready to go home, I happened by the Theater/Drama section. I rushed to it and found a book of Monologues. What a challenge! Learning a monologue by heart and figuring out how to perform it in a realistic way. I used to be pretty good in high school theater, and I had a knack for memorizing long piece of texts. So I picked it up, bought it, and in a half hour I had memorized the following monologue from the play Convergence: (I’m typing it from memory, by the way)
I wonder what has become of you. I wonder how my memory would stand up alongside the living version of you. I wonder if we would pass by each other and never know it. I wonder if we already have. These unfinished letters are a way to cut through the loneliness. To overcome Kibera which is not at all a lonely place. Is it not dissonant when we feel the most alone when we are surrounded by nothing but people? This all, all of it, sounds so formal. I hate to think about you, of all people, formally. Which is to say even the thought of you makes me feel safe. We can, both of us, pinpoint the moment it stopped being safe, when life informed us we weren’t the only ones on the planet. But the time before. That was lovely. So perhaps it’s not you but a confident, happy, innocent version of myself that I miss. Perhaps that’s who you are to me. Perhaps that is what this perpetual, habitual letter is all about? Perhaps.
Who knows, maybe I’ll create a youtube channel and perform them as realistically as I can. Wouldn’t that be fun? That would definitely be a challenge, wouldn’t it? My creative juices are dying to get out, and I guess I’m experimenting with different ways to do so. This one is particularly great, because I haven’t done acting in so long… it really takes me back.
Whatever the case, I’m trying to become comfortable with the fact that I ENJOY jumping from idea to idea, without committing to sticking to any one in particular. That has been a really difficult thing to admit for me. I thought I was focused and ambitious. Turns out that I am more of a flake. I’m trying to embrace my flakiness in my hobbies, so I hope you are not surprised if next week I decide to give a shot at something else 🙂
Anyways, I’ve had a great weekend so far. I’d like to publicly thank Brian for agreeing to go out with me. It might be hard for some people to understand, but introverts like to be in the house and to be left alone. When you know the answer will be “no” to a question like going out somewhere, and you have the issues with rejection that I do, you dread asking the question in the first place. So it took courage of me to overcome my fear and ask anyway, and it took courage of him to overcome his anxieties about leaving his comfort zone to take me out. There’s a lot of courage going around this weekend, and I’m thankful that we could both overcome it and have a great time in the process 🙂
Thanks for reading this far 🙂
ina