Every baby is born with a handbook at their bedside. A carefully prepared booklet, government sent, and handled by the parents. They slot in behind the medical notes on the cots and beds, the parents often leaving theirs at home knowing the new chapters by heart in preparation. Sometimes a parent arrives with it in hand, others read it quietly while waiting for birth, husbands scan the pages desperate for a hidden answer, and siblings disregard it – after all, they know more than the newborn.
When I was born nobody had a handbook for me. I don’t know why; my parents had sent for one. When I was two, they found an old one, aggressively loved, stained with who knows what, mostly stuff I hope is food, though I often convince myself the final pages are blood splattered.
When I could read, I found there were pages, chapters, and entire sections missing. My friends laughed when they saw my copy. Their copies sat in a Perspex folder decorated with stickers of their fascination, horses, tractors, puppies, clouds. I stuck my stickers onto the cover, something I now realise is unofficial treason. I coated the cover in stickers of each passing phase of youth, trains, tractors (especially John Deere), horses, puppies, clouds, Disney, blue, France. While others maintained an elegant form, mine grew tattered and confused, beaten as I frantically searched for the lost pages.
My friend had a chapter on social etiquette. I couldn’t even pronounce it. I tried and it resulted in a hoard of laughter as my voice rang out ‘eti-kut.’ I’d stumbled. A huge red ‘x’ had appeared over me in my mind, a sign that I was to be struck off Earth by God or society.
I stumbled and fell and fell and fell until I struggled to rise. My handbook began to fall apart the more I sought answers. I searched for friends, but my torn handbook warded them away. I was a bad omen. A hair in the dough of their cookie cutter world.
I was growing up as my handbook disintegrated. I taped it. Held it with staples and paperclips desperate to prevent the rupture of the final seams. I had to fit in despite this grave error. I had to be one of them. I copied and acted my way through middle school. A fake base of a person held me up in high school until they started noticing the cracks. I appeared immune to teenage angst, unbothered by boys and dates and dances.
What choice did I have? I kept crushes to myself. I felt inhuman and to be human was to have emotion, to love, something I was neither worthy of nor allowed to pursue. While my classmates gossiped about each other and told racy stories over my head, I stayed silent, as if my heart didn’t race when the boy with the curly hair made eye contact with me, as if I didn’t long to experience some of this mystery for myself.
They were juvenile feelings. Sparks. I met him by chance, a friend of a friend. His eyes were stark, like a cat’s, but tamer, the same wild spontaneity but none of the slyness. His hair curled, like the first boy’s had done, but stayed flat to his head by some invisible force. He was kind to me. He treated me like an equal. It helped that by now I felt able to leave the handbook at home, now it would only ward him off later.
Now I was missing another chapter. A chapter I had no role model to replicate, no icon to mirror. I panicked at the surge of feelings rushing through me; they were moving too fast. He was handsome, there was that. Attractive, yes. But then what? What does one do next? I stalled. I stalled in the third lane of the motorway, grinding to a halt while my emotions crashed into my bones and demanded they be allowed to escape.
In films, they confess their love, their love dies, then they find their way back. Do I copy that? Do I tell him I love him and want to marry him? Dump him and then hope in five years he comes back to me, carrying a bunch of flowers and proposing once more.
In music, it’s a game of cat and mouse, a will they, won’t they. Do I seduce then rebuke him? How long do I do that before I drive him away? Do I institute the film method after the music method?
In books, they’re fated. Mates, partners, soul bound. Perhaps I’m being too impatient, and I should let the universe unfurl our mystery. A tragic past, a set of trials, and a reward of infinite love once we’ve both conquered our trauma. My gut tells me the book method comes last, though I wish it were first.
When he looks at me, I malfunction. I forget every fact I’ve scrounged from my handbook. I go red, I avoid eye contact, I make awkward jokes and trauma dump without meaning to. I can smile through pain, through tears and fear, but I fail to smile at him. I want to, but I’m afraid. I don’t know what I’m afraid of.
[Image Credit : Photo by Evan Wise on Unsplash]
