Yesterday I went over Molly's house and hung around with her and her sisters. We did not do much of anything. At first we just hung around, looked at funny, artsy pictures their dad took at family gatherings, and drew random stuff on paper that happenned to lying around, which I guess is a preferred activity in the O'Connell household. After Molly's sisters drew caricatures of each other, several toilets, and explodingdog-type stick figures saying things like "cows, for instance, were never awkward with me," the middle sister, Liz, said, "Okay, okay. I think it's time to play 'Let's decide what to have for dinner.'"
"Alright" said Kate, the oldest, taking a new piece of paper. Kate is about six three. Like everyone in the family, she wears bright, mismatched vintage clothes, modified by duct tape, safety pins, and magic marker. Her hair looks like it is about twenty-four hours away from being dreds. She is a biochemist. "'Let's decide what to have for dinner' starts with a picture of a little girl." She drew a long rectangular body with stubby legs, no arms, and a little round head. Like all of her drawings, it made me smile a little. "Named... Molly." She gave the girl hair and eyes.
"Is she lovely and charming?" said Molly.
"She's very sullen," said Kate, and gave the girl a frown. (It is clear that Liz and Kate don't have anything close to antisocial, depressive tendancies.) "One day, Molly came across... A zucchini." She drew a zucchini.
"But the zucchini we have is wicked old..."
"Shh! I'm telling the story. Then the zucchini fell into a blender." She drew a blender.
"Make it have sharp killer blades," said Liz.
"It does. And they have blood on them. Then Molly fell into the blender too."
"Hey!"
"And..." she carefully drew what was clearly "Molly" again, but this time with the rectangular body replaced with the zucchini. "...Molly-zucchini!"
"Ugh. Let's just make grilled pizza."
"Ooh, and chocolate fondu. Let's make that too."
We decided to go to the grocery store to buy ingredients, but the van made funny noises whenever Liz tried to steer. We opened the hood and tried to find the steering fluid.
"What are we doing? We don't know anything about cars!"
"I think the flux compassitor is broken."
"I'm giving up and calling dad." After their father got home from his weekend sailing trip, he put steering fluid into the car. We went to the grocery store. We bought fruit, pizza dough, and all of the grocery store's chocolate bars. People looked at us funny. I can kind of see why. Kate and Liz look kind of out of place anywhere outside of their house. We went back. Molly and I made grilled pizza with pineapple, and Liz and Kate made chocolate fondu. Molly's parents told us about their sailing trip, and the family reminisced about other things they have cooked/tried to cook in the past. We listened to the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack. Then Kate went to visit their brother (whose antisocial, depressive tendancies are worse than Molly's) and their father drove me home. We planned to go prom shopping later in the week, because the dresses cost like twenty dollars at this time of year. Overall, it was fairly perfect. Almost as perfect as the time we made pancakes for dinner with chopped-up chocolate bars in them because CVS was out of chocolate chips, and then I spontaneously slept over and Molly and I played the cliff game until two in the morning.
When I got home, I wrote this:
So fucking terribly lonely.
I don't know why I should be lonely. I just spent five hours with Molly and her family. It always feels so warm and happy there. Everything is beautiful. I mean beautiful in the best sense of the word. Quirky, artsy beautiful. Dense vegitation, chipping paint, mismatched clothes, sunlight, sunflowers, white curtains, indie-pop beautiful. I can't even describe it. It is almost profound. Beauty and happiness live at the O'Connells' house. They always have, since the first time I went there in sixth grade. And her sisters are the coolest, most beautiful people I have ever met. Tall, wierd, funny, loud, and strikingly intelligent, with huge blue eyes and the same hands as Molly. Like your favorite characters in some beautiful, quirky, indie movie. I want to touch their personalities. They don't seem real. Neither does their closeness to one another and to Molly. It makes me wish with all my heart that I had siblings.
Maybe this is where the loneliness comes from. Maybe seeing that glowing, profound happiness makes me sad because I know I can never be a part of it. I can come close to it and look at it and bask in its glow temporarily, but I'll never be able to touch it, because I'm just not cool enough to have been born an O'Connell.
It's actually quite appropriate that we listened to the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack. That's the kind of movie that you're reminded of when you're around them. And I've always sympathized with Eli. I am Eli. I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum...
Maybe it's something else too. I care about Molly more than anything else in the world. I thought about that before I said it. It's true. But I've been afraid, lately, that if I get any closer, it might be, you know... too close. I might be risking something that I can't afford to risk, what with Molly being a Christian and definately, definately straight. I've definately been withdrawing from her lately, especially since she read my diary. And I think... this might be what I'm afraid of.
Maybe I'm wrong. I mean wrong in general. Maybe I need to completely redefine my ideas about love. Maybe love is not just sex, or extreme friendship, or infatuation, or dependancy. Maybe you can care about someone all you want, and still not fall in love with them, because love is something different. Maybe love is what I used to think it was, before I even thought about it at all. Maybe it's that simple, because maybe it's all in your head. Maybe it requires no analysis at all. Maybe all that complex crap doesn't matter one bit. Maybe you are in love with someone when you decide that you want to be.
Jesus. I've been trying to figure out for the longest time what love is. If the answer's been that simple all along, I might have to smack myself in the forehead right here and now.
I guess in any case I should not worry about it, and enjoy it when she says nice things to me instead of tensing up and mumbling. Much the way I used to when Adam said nice things to me. And that time in seventh grade when she looked kind of confused and said "I don't know if I have a best friend. I've never had one before. I don't know. Are you my best friend?" At this point, I was still in awe of her, almost worshipping her from a distance for posessing that quirky beauty that I knew I'd never be able to fully understand. The thought of being best friends with her baffled me. I turned red and shrugged and changed the subject, and tried to pretend she'd never brought it up.
"So if we're going prom shopping," she said while we were sitting in the shade of something beautiful and overgrown waiting for the pizza to grill, "I guess that means we're going to the prom."
"Yeah, I was planning on it anyway, whether I get a date or not."
"Yeah, you don't need a date. We could go together. Hey Aidan, will you be my prom date?"
I tensed up a little and then said, "...I'll keep you on a back burner, okay?"
She laughed. "Fair enough."
"If neither of us gets a date, I'll definately go with you, of course."
"What if only one of us gets a date? It'll probably be you. That'll be depressing." This is a considerable possibility. And of course, she knows now who I'm kind of already hoping will ask me. Or at least, who I'm hoping I can get Tom or Dave to pressure into asking me.
"Um... The other one will go with Dave?"
This made her laugh again. I said, "Sorry. That was terrible."
"But true."
At this point Liz came out and tried to feed the cat a pepper. "Cat!" she said. The cat didn't come over.
"I think she likes chicken and cheese better."
"Yes," said Liz, looking at me suddenly. "But then, who doesn't like chicken and cheese? Vegetarians and those who are lactose intollerant? VEGANS!?" She waved her fist in the air as if making a passionate speech. "Scoff." She walked away.
On another, possibly-but-possibly-not related note, It seems like I'm suddenly sprouting emotions I didn't used to have. I thought I had everything all figured out, and now in the past year or so everything's been warped out of proportion. It almost seems like one of those deals where a kid grows really quickly and is six feet tall in the eighth grade, and then in highschool suddenly stops growing and puts on a lot of weight. It feels like I was intellectually a little early and emotionally a little behind. This doesn't mean that I don't have emotions, or even nessescarily that I'm that smart. It just means that things have been kind of confusing lately.
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