My mother got me a magic 8-ball, but on the same trip told me a story that when she was younger, she busted someone's 8-ball growing up, and saw the thing for what it was, less than magic, a nice-looking polyhedron word-covered creature floating in black ink.
Still.
I'd faith in the sucker even so, even after the creature inside it fell apart: sometimes, the 8-ball would give me two answers and sometimes only just inky foam would appear and I'd have to shake the sucker up or tilt it even to read the answer to my yes-no question.
Same reason I held to fortune cookie fortunes and horoscopes, and the fortunes you got as prizes in the Girl Talk game I played over and over, often alone, when I was 11.
When I was that age, I had these projections about my life and, for instance, the men who would fill it. You can get addicted to all the possibilities and, rather than exhaust them, obsess on them - and that, my friend, is exactly what I did. And do. Right now I'm thinking of the man who left me over a month ago, thinking what if I saw him in three years, in another city: better?.
And I got out my first diary today and wondered who I thought I would be at this point, 19, summer after my freshman year of college. Did I know I would turn out like this, though, with x cup and pant size and measurements, and what did I know about my hair?
And the wake of losing my virginity I remembered going back over all the fantasies that I had as a kid about that (or even more recently, more vividly): saw myself married, or just old enough, but of course, for all of us growing up, the year 2000 held a shiny certain faraway mystique, and I think I would have been impressed had the 8-ball let it slip that mine would happen July 4, 2000 - which, as a matter of fact, it did.
That aside, possibility, a favorite fascination of mine, is giving way to actuality, and I'm just in enough of a spiral to cry about it tonight.
Sometimes, it's necessary to revisit your childhood self (like in that stupid new Bruce Willis flick, which I would totally watch on late-night cable, by the way) and look in the mirror and said, "How did I get from that to this? Really." |
