I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(42)

I just want to tell you that your outfit today is spot-on. Are you wearing seasonal socks? Damn right you are. The rumpled, under-the-elbow half-roll of your sleeves didn’t happen by accident, either, and I appreciate that. You looked up a video tutorial online so you could do it right, I bet. And before you closed out the video, I bet you left it a review. You look like everyone’s favorite fun professor who’s also in a band on the side and knows how to arrange a handful of flowers in a jar. That’s a good look for you.

Not only does everyone find your appearance neat and visually pleasing, we all admire your words, too. Your emails dance on the line between eloquence and candor. You have a real sense for when to go with bullet points instead of paragraphs, and you’re always handy with an emoji or a culturally relevant movie clip. Some say there’s no place for exclamation points anymore, but you intuit precisely when to employ that unexpected little punch, and it always delights your readers. The note you sent to the whole neighborhood about the raccoon problem? Clear, to the point, but not bossy. The part where you called the raccoons “masked banditos with a taste for burritos” was a riot. Bravo.

The dinner you made for your book club last night had to have taken you hours to plan and execute. I know you left the packaging from the grocery store sponge cake out on the counter because you wanted to make your friends a strawberry shortcake they would love but you also didn’t want anyone to roll their eyes and call you a perfectionist for making everything from scratch. Did you use a vegetable peeler or a paring knife to get the sides of the cucumber to look like green-and-white peppermint stripes? That was a whimsical touch and really added depth to the colors in the salad. People don’t think about that sort of thing enough. You do.



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I want you to know that I see your face when someone parks over the line in a crowded parking lot and inadvertently wastes a whole second spot, and I know your scowl isn’t really about the parking space. When you stop to pick up trash on a sidewalk or put the to-go menus back in their rack at the sandwich shop, you wish you didn’t have to. You’d rather everyone else pull their weight, but if they won’t, you will. You like having work to do, but it’s hard for you to work alongside people who cut corners and blow off responsibilities. It feels like they’re doing these things to spite you, like they slack off because they know you’ll catch whatever balls they drop. You can’t fathom how they can feel okay letting so many things remain half done. This leaves you in a constant state of simmering, low-grade resentment, and you feel guilty about occasionally having the urge to throw your laptop at someone’s face. You wish these things didn’t get to you. You want to live and let live.

And I won’t tell anybody, but I know you didn’t really want to make costumes for the community center’s spring musical. You don’t even like Mary Poppins. But you filled out the feedback form after last year’s play, because that’s what you’re supposed to do if you attend, fill out the feedback form. And because you were so detailed—that’s what you should do, you should give details if someone asks for your input—they asked you to do the costumes this year; and you said yes, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to give help when someone asks for it—and now you’re stuck trying to figure out how to make Mary’s dress fit around the cast on the young actor’s broken arm and you want the play to be great but you wish you hadn’t said yes and you’re mad that no one else said yes and that the same people always end up doing everything.

You wish you could take a break from carrying everything. It’s all so heavy. You are so fucking tired.

I know.



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And I know you can’t help it.

I know that even if you wound the clock all the way back to the first time you can remember being this way—the moment you perceived that when you got things right, you got love, that when you achieved, you felt peace—that there’d probably still be no way to undo it. It’s in your nature. It wouldn’t matter if that moment or any other moment had happened differently.

You see yourself the way you think the world sees you, so you value yourself only when you are accomplishing and producing and finishing and succeeding. If you can’t value yourself, then there’s no reason to get up every morning, and if there’s no reason to get up, then . . . what? You feel untethered, as if someone has turned off gravity and you’ve been spun into infinite space, a black hole that demands, WHAT’S THE POINT OF YOU?

It would be embarrassing to explain all that to someone, I know. It’s awfully existential and weird to feel that if you get the punctuation wrong in a tweet, the world is a purposeless void. Not everyone gets it. So they don’t get that if you worry that much over the little things, the big things seem so much bigger than they already are. It’s bad enough wondering whether you’ve bought the right kind of sunscreen—are you living the right life? Should you change paths? Go back to school? Stay together or break up? Are you being the right kind of parent/daughter/sister/friend?

And I know that the more you do, the more it takes to feel like you’ve done enough. That’s why you say “Sure!” to everything and sweat all the small stuff. Then you can be the person who gets the job done and saves the day and then maybe you can rest.