One year I even planned out a way to catch my parents putting the presents under the tree after they thought we had fallen asleep on Christmas Eve -- can you imagine it? I don't know whether to be proud of being so cunning at so early an age or so cynical.\n\nI never did it -- it stayed a plan, and I got to stop believing in Santa Claus the same quiet way everyone else did.\n\n<<back>>
Maybe they were, maybe they really weren't -- I don't know what they really should look like but one kid who was with us grabbed a stick and started driving it into what we all believed were a million not-yet-born frogs. I knew it was wrong but I didn't know how to put it in words, so I just said: //How would you like it if that was you?//\n\nThe kid said: //You // would //say something like that.//\n\n<<back>>
Christine moved away a few months later. I thought of her every time I passed [[her house]]. Not in a sad sort of way -- just remembering.\n\nPaul moved away a few years after that: first to Westminster, in the county next to mine. We hung out a few times, but it was difficult. My parents had to drive me there, of course, and it was maybe an hour's drive besides. A year or two after that, his family moved back to Texas.\n\nI have never seen either Paul or Christine since, and [[maybe I never will]]. It's okay, though. All that is past me now. Nighttime is normal to me; [[I have grown into it]]. It's just another part of the day. I like driving in it, in fact. It's much more restful. Everything is a shape instead of an object.\n\nI think I miss that sense of danger a little, the way I miss finding toys so enchanting. I miss sneaking out only because it was a way to break the rules, but in a harmless sort of way -- though my parents would surely argue otherwise. It was at least a way that would leave me with no sense of guilt, of wrongdoing. There are very few grownups who can break the rules without serious punishment.\n\nBut then, we can go for nighttime walks anytime we like.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>
I think sometimes I live in a bubble. At its center is the present: everything I can hear and touch and see. And all around me is the future -- but it's only a future that I'm imagining for myself. It's not that hard, you know, to fall into this kind of bubble. You get good at predicting what will happen -- and anyway some parts are just gimmes. I'll go to work tomorrow morning. I'll feel a little drowsy and sluggish because it's a Monday. I'll eat lunch -- maybe I'll have sushi, or get a sandwich (no hots, light on the mayo). There are a couple places to buy food that are my favorites, and I'll go to one of my favorites because it's Monday.\n\nIt's the very definition of safety, matching what happens to your plans. But it's only a bubble, and I'm so scared that all around me is the real world and I'm missing it all.\n\n<<back>>
I don't remember what she said. It doesn't matter. Almost always the words we speak don't -- it's the song we sing that counts. The rhythm of our thoughts. The melody of sentences. What she said to me was only music.\n\nIt was over, finally. The secret was gone. She didn't really like me, not the way I did her, but then she had no reason to. We didn't even know each other. And anyway, it wasn't important anymore. It was over. She was [[so kind]]. We talked for maybe forty-five minutes. It was a nice day. I do remember that.\n\nThis kid in my class Doug came biking up the hill. //Ooooh,// he called out. //Chris and Christine.//\n\nI went running after him -- but Christine said, //Don't bother.// And I turned, sat back down, and thought: that //was// silly.\n\nMaybe that was the moment where [[I grew up a little]].
!!Night-time\n!!!by <<pop 'chris' 'Chris Klimas'>>\nNobody knows this but you, but I used to sneak out of my parents' house at [[night]] when I was young. It sounds like almost nothing, the way all secrets change once you've outgrown them -- but then it felt like the deepest secret I'd ever possess, and maybe [[the wrongest thing]] I'd ever do.\n\nThe first time I did it I was in [[fourth grade]].
I never could get the hang of wearing watches, even when I was a little kid. I kept losing them, forgetting to put them on in the morning, breaking them, even. As such they made reliable birthday presents for me from distant relatives.\n\nThe last time I tried -- I really tried -- was after I graduated college. It felt like a good time to get serious about things. But it just didn't take.\n\n<<back>>
Paul's family was Baptist, and fervent believers at that. My parents were comfortably nonreligious, and it never seemed like a problem to me, but it was for him.\n\nPaul told me one day: //I don't want your mom to go to Hell.// And it scared me then, just the idea, but now I think it was the only way he ever did me wrong. I went to Bible study classes with him -- he tricked me the first time, told me it was a softball game held by his youth group. It was a softball game but afterwards everyone went inside and read things that I guess were supposed to teach you how to be a better Christian.\n\nWe took turns reading them. My passage said that Carl Sagan was wrong, and so was everyone else who believed in a big bang instead of a garden of Eden. I don't know how but it felt wrong to me. I didn't understand the argument or anything so sophisticated but I wanted to get out of there.\n\nPaul's pull on me was so strong that I went to a couple more youth group meetings anyway -- but never a softball game again. We went to see //Kindergarten Cop// together and I think there was a video game tournament. I don't know why they organized these things -- but then I don't know anything about how youth groups were supposed to work. And they seemed harmless to me. There were no readings.\n\nFor a while I argued with my parents about it. I wanted to be free to try out being a Christian. They didn't like it -- you have to remember that I was only nine, if that, and that from a grown-up point of view, Paul did belong to a pretty fundamentalist branch of Christianity. I was mad at them for a while, and then I wasn't. It's easy like that when you're a kid.\n\nPaul and I stayed friends, though. And maybe it bothered him but it didn't bother me, how things went.\n\n<<back>>
(Everything seems so serious when it's actually happening and so silly afterwards.)\n\n<<back>>
I have to note here that my parents snore more loudly than I think anybody else I have ever met. It's pretty funny, listening to them, because they're both loud but in different ways. My mother's snores are softer but last longer; my dad's tend to be louder and more abrupt.\n\nI can say all this with a clear conscience because I know I snore too. (Just not as bad, I hope -- not 'til I really get older, anyway.) My sister has been managed to dodge the bullet, I think. Once I caught her snoring on a car trip, but it was so quiet you had to sort of lean in to hear her. Like a tiny bee zipping through the air.\n\n<<back>>
It was supposed to be a secret, my crush on Christine. I barely knew her -- we only carpooled to a program the Science Center downtown hosted on weekends for fifth-graders who were good at math -- so there was no reason at all for me to like her. I did anyway. And it was supposed to be a secret but everyone in my class knew it. I don't know how. I never said a thing about it. They made fun of me a lot about it. I don't know why. ([[Almost nobody liked me then]].)\n\nAll the taunting made me clutch my crush tighter and tighter to my heart, until that too became part of the crush. It had to stay secret. It was almost a crime, what I was doing. No one could know -- most of all Christine couldn't know.\n\nIt was my idea, though, to give her a Valentine's Day present. Kids did that in my class. They were [[in love with each other]] but nobody had any problems with that. I wanted to [[be part of that]].\n\nSo I went to the drugstore and bought her a box of chalky valentine heart candies -- the kind that get printed with messages like ''U R A CUTIE'' and ''BE MINE'' -- and wrote only on the back:\n\n//[[From a friend]]//
I knew the way through my neighborhood [[by heart]] -- the first parts were the tricky ones, with the porch light and all the streetlights clustered around my house. I made my way to the woods behind my house and cut across the neighborhood. It was fun. I remember that. Everything was different at night but there was no time to figure out exactly how. Maybe now I would describe it as the same difference there is between [[a thought and a feeling]].\n\nAnd I was scared, too -- and it was a new kind of scared, because normally I could name exactly why I was scared. But there were so many reasons that I couldn't think of any of them.\n\nI made it to where we would meet and no one had seen me. It was luck, maybe. What good are a nine-year-old's plans, anyway? I waited for Paul at the mouth of the [[big woods]], where the trees grew sparsely together. And then [[nothing happened]].
The next morning brought the same routine I had always known as a kid. We ate pancakes for breakfast: it was Sunday, and we always had pancakes on Sundays, and then we'd go to the library. The first batch of pancakes was always a little too crispy. My dad put [[Golden Griddle syrup]] on his; I liked Mrs. Butterworth's, because the bottle was shaped like a little woman.\n\nBut -- things were different here, too. The feeling I had had the night before had followed me here. Everything seemed [[a little smaller]].\n\nI found out from Paul that he had fallen asleep by accident. We tried again the next night, but that time I didn't have the stamina for it and fell asleep around 10 o'clock. I only felt a little bit bad about it. I had had an adventure already. I didn't need two.\n\nWe didn't sneak out again until [[Valentine's Day]].
I couldn't just hand it to her. That would break the secret. We set out one night, Paul and I. The path took us between the elementary school on the top of the hill and the middle school below. There were lights around each but you could thread between them in the dark. I had diagrammed out her front yard and porch, figuring out the easiest way to get to the door. She had a dog. That would be a problem. I needed to slip the box between the screen door and the main door -- otherwise rain could smudge my writing. That would be really hard to pull off without waking anyone up.\n\nGetting there was easy. We cut through the woods where [[the honeysuckle]] grew and there her house was. I was terrified. I couldn't go forward. I just couldn't do it. The lights around her house were almost blinding.\n\nPaul took the box from me and went himself.\n\nI waited across the street. It took forever but then it was done. [[Nobody got caught]]. I was safe.
Paul was my hero. He lived in a house behind mine; his family came from [[Missouri]], but really belonged to Texas. His father was a contractor who was following his fortune. He was a year older than me, but it never really mattered. He liked me, which almost [[no one seemed to]] then. Part of it maybe was that he was homeschooled by his mom, and didn't know he was supposed to think I was stupid -- but really he was just a nice person. We hung out all the time after school. We played [[Nintendo]]; we went exploring through the woods; we rode our bikes; we did all kinds of kid things together, in short. We even found [[secret photographs]] in his house.\n\nI don't know whose idea it was, his or mine, but we decided to [[sneak out one night]] and meet in the [[big woods]].
[[The chances|http://funny2.com/odds.htm]] that you'll be killed in an airplane accident this year are 1 in 354,319. The odds you will date a supermodel, on the other hand, are 1 in 88,000.\n\n<<back>>
When I'm on vacation I like to go for walks by myself on the beach after dinner. I choose a direction north or south and go as far as I can until I think I have to turn back so that I can make it home by dark. Once I walked from Dewey Beach, a quiet sort of beach, all the way to where the boardwalk at Rehoboth began. I felt like an alien there, gazing on the long rows of restaurants and kite shops and ice cream sellers. I had been there a couple times before but everything seemed different, having walked [[that distance|http://local.google.com/local?saddr=1+Dagsworthy+St,+Rehoboth+Beach,+DE+19971&daddr=1299+S+Boardwalk,+Rehoboth+Beach,+DE+19971&f=li&dq=1+dagsworthy+st+dewey+beach+de&cid=&ll=38.70132,-75.077004&spn=0.016545,0.029268]] instead of driving it. \n\nWhen I am alone I think sometimes -- or maybe the word for it really is //wish// -- that I might run into someone I had not seen in a very long time. It is almost completely impossible that it would happen, or even that we would recognize each other, but I wish it all the same.\n\nIt's never happened but that's no reason to stop wishing.\n\n<<back>>
It's good for everybody to hurt somebody once in a while\nThe things I do to people I love shouldn't be allowed\n\n(Counting Crows, "Chelsea")\n\n<<back>>
He called the cartridges 'tapes' -- even though there clearly wasn't any tape inside -- just as he also would say that he was fixing to do things. Just little bits of language you remember about people.\n\n<<back>>
Night-time
I will always love the movie //[[Big Trouble in Little China|http://imdb.com/title/tt0090728]]//, just because it was the most fantastic of those bad movies. It had thunder gods and magic potions and bad guys who exploded when you beat them up.\n\n<<back>>
A happy childhood has ruined many a promising life. And it wasn't all unhappy. Go on with the story, and you'll see.\n\n(Robertson Davies, //What's Bred in the Bone//)\n\n<<back>>
I spent the night at my friend Jeff's house once. I don't know if this is supposed to be weird or not -- boys having sleepovers, I mean -- but it didn't seem like a big deal then.\n\nA week later we were supposed to write a story in school. I think we had the choice between nonfiction and fiction -- to learn the difference, I guess. So I started to write about sleeping over at Jeff's house -- how he had a lion in a cage painted on the wall of his bedroom, how we argued over what the word //inflammable// meant. The teacher asked us to read our stories and Jeff raised his hand in the middle of mine.\n\n//He should say his story is fiction,// Jeff said. //Because it isn't true.//\n\nI -- I just didn't get it. I thought maybe I had dreamed it.\n\n<<back>>
We went there after school at the end of the year, right before we graduated. Just to see the honeysuckle.\n\n<<back>>
I went to school the next day, same as always. And it was [[a Valentine's Day just like every other]]; we got chalky candy from our teachers. We didn't mark the holiday any other way. We had grown past the part of childhood where everyone gave valentines to each other as [[a matter of habit]]. I waited for something to happen -- I had no idea what but I knew something //should//.\n\nI guess I wanted to get caught, deep down. I didn't want to have to pretend anymore. It was about that more than [[fourth-grade love]]. Maybe Paul knew that. Maybe that's why he told me I should go tell her I was in love with her.\n\nI walked to her house alone after school one day. There was no particular occasion to it. Doing it in the daylight felt dangerous and strange but I kept walking. Fear is weird that way -- there's a certain point where it just overwhelms you and there is no room anymore for doubt. You just march forward.\n\nI came to her front door and rang [[the doorbell]].
Black and white, two stories. Symmetrical. When Christmas came they put candles in the windows but did nothing else.\n\n<<back>>
It sounds simple enough but the details of the plan were more complicated. Our front door and stairs creaked a lot; I made a chart of the stairs and noted which ones to avoid. I tried to leave the front door half-cracked so the latch wouldn't make any noise when I opened it, but my father noticed it after dinner. We even had jingle bells attached to the doorknob; I figured out that you could keep them silent if you opened the door slowly enough. It was [[all planned out]].\n\nI assembled all the black clothes I had and pretended to be asleep until the very thick of the night: 11:00 PM. I kept a [[digital watch]] beside me and a flashlight so I could check it. It was tricky, not falling asleep by accident. I made up ideas for video games to keep myself awake.\n\nOnce my family was [[sound asleep]], I climbed down the stairs -- I even walked along the railing to avoid a particularly loud set of steps -- and opened the door as quietly as I could. I waited maybe a moment, just to see if anyone had heard me, and then because there was really no way of telling, I [[darted out the door]].
Did I say, //Christine, I am in love with you?// No. It would have been too definite. Because even though I was standing right there with nothing to do but [[unburden my heart]], I still felt as though I could not tell it all.\n\nDid I say, //Christine, I want to spend time with you?// No. I had no idea what it meant to go on a date -- or even that that was something you were supposed to do. My understanding of everything went only as far as my own secret would carry me. \n\nDid I say, //Christine, it was me who left you that present?// No. Not even this, the safest way through. The way to say the least but convey the most. The way I would probably do it now, if I were in my fourth-grade shoes again.\n\nDid I even say anything?\n\nI don't know.\n\nShe was standing there in the doorway, the screen door half-opened. And then my memory shifts: we were sitting on [[the curb of the street together]], and she was talking to me.
(Even now I wonder sometimes why people are so nice to me.)\n\n<<back>>
I think too much. Anyone can tell you that. And the secret is that thinking is a way around feeling; when someone hurts you, you can enumerate the reasons why instead of simply... being hurt. When you're scared, you can try to reassure yourself with facts and [[probabilities]]. When you've given up, you can console yourself that there was nothing you could have done. Simply nothing.\n\nBut they're no comfort, thoughts. Not really.\n\n<<back>>
He pronounced it 'misery' -- on purpose, I mean. He hated the place but never really explained why. And so whenever anyone says that state's name, I hear his voice in my head correcting the pronunciation.\n\n<<back>>
This one girl Jen had a crush on me, though I was too dumb to figure it out. To get my attention she stole my three-hole punch, which was just about the coolest object an elementary school student could own. So I hated her for this; I thought she was just being mean like everyone else.\n\n<<back>>
The same feeling you get when you return to your elementary school for the first time as a grownup and realize how tiny everything was: the desks, the chairs, the lockers. Everything was tiny but you didn't know it at the time.\n\n<<back>>
//Have you ever been in love? she asked.//\n\nYes -- but it was a long time ago, and the memories of it grow dimmer and dimmer in my mind, so that remembering it is like viewing a far-off planet through a telescope.\n\n<<back>>
I have never had a girlfriend, or even a girl to take out, on any Valentine's Day I have ever lived. I don't feel horrible about it -- but maybe, I reason in my darker moments, it's because I couldn't begin to guess what I'm missing.\n\n<<back>>
It's one thing to do nothing in someplace so boring as a doctor's waiting room or a subway platform. Those places are made for waiting. They're intentionally dull. They are meant to be forgotten as soon as your name is called or a train arrives. It's hard, just passing time in the middle of the woods near midnight. Your parents may be awake now, looking for you, beginning to panic, and all around me the woods beckoned me forward -- //run away, go in, but just do something// -- but where is Paul? I stared down at the [[digital watch]] I still carried with me.\n\nWe had never talked about what exactly we would do tonight. I just assumed that he would have a plan. He has always had one. But now -- I just didn't know what to do. I was maybe more scared than I thought I was. I think I stayed there twelve minutes before I decided to go home.\n\nIt was easier, faster even, coming home. I think I ran through the streets that time. I slipped past the front door, up the stairs, into bed. Pulled up the blankets. No one knew. I was safe. [[I had done it]].
(What a dumb turn of phrase, as if love were something complicated and painful and fragile) \n\n<<back>>
My sister and I have a competition with each other on my father's birthday -- the winner is whoever gives my father the card with the fewest words written it. Last year I won -- but only by omitting the word //love//. I just signed my name instead.\n\n<<back>>
They were hidden above the doorframe of his laundry room, leftover from whoever lived there before. It was an envelope with a stack of black-and-white photos and a metal shuriken -- one of those throwing stars ninjas use in movies and video games. We looked at the photos in passing but the shuriken held our interest more -- for just the briefest moment it seemed like all the things we saw in [[terrible action movies]] could actually be true.\n\nPaul showed the photographs to his parents, and they took them away. There were pictures of a naked woman in there. I wonder maybe if he had seen them and immediately [[knew they were bad]] and kept them away from me.\n\n<<back>>
I was a quiet kid -- now I'm a quiet grownup -- and I never figured out the rules of how things were supposed to work with people. The only way I ever got attention in school was because I was smart, and that mostly meant [[kids made fun of me]]. I had friends -- [[sort of]]. But usually they'd only last a year or two. I guess that's how friendships go anyway when you're a kid.\n\n<<back>>
-- That's what this girl who I went to high school with declared of me after we saw each other for the first time in a few years. //You grew into yourself.// Whatever exactly that means -- I don't know, not really.\n\n<<back>>
I always thought Golden Griddle was alright at best, but my father loves it -- to the point where my mother went to the trouble of special-ordering it from Canada, because all the supermarkets stopped carrying it. For all I know my parents still consume the stuff on Sundays -- still listening to //Car Talk// taped from the night before.\n\n<<back>>
Once a girl I barely knew gave me a birthday card written in Greek. She didn't know what it said and I of course didn't know either. I fell in love with her on the spot, even after I noticed there was an English translation printed on the back, after I could understand what it was she meant by it: happy birthday. No more, no less.\n\nI love ambiguity more than I have ever loved any girl.\n\n<<back>>
The dark part of the world was closed off to me as a kid; we had strict bedtimes and my parents never seemed that interested in going out themselves. When we saw movies, we went to matinees.\n\n<<back>>
There were two woods in my neighborhood: the small one, right behind my house, and the big one that surrounded one edge of the housing development. We played in the small one all the time; Paul even rigged up a fortress inside it that lasted a week before someone came through and tore it down. I used to climb one tree there all the time until I fell from it by accident and almost broke my wrist.\n\nThe big forest was immense. It seemed to go on forever, though there were paths through it, and there was a broken-down playground at its center. I still wonder how it got there. We found a mass of [[frog eggs]] there once. We wandered as far as we could and found ourselves in someone's backyard. It amazed me. The woods seemed like the edge of the world then.\n\n<<back>>
They always seemed a little strange to me, those pre-printed valentines that you could buy from stores, with only room enough to put someone's name at the top. But then I hate [[greeting cards with words]] in them. The idea of having to match my thoughts to something someone was paid to come up with seems wrong to me. So instead I get cards with the most generic messages I can find, or [[none at all]] -- and the ironic part is that I don't bother writing anything special at all in the blank spaces left to me.\n\n<<back>>
Jeff was sort of dating this girl Jamie for a while. They hung out after school together. Rumors swirled that they stopped going out because she was about to beat him at Monopoly and he flipped the game board over before she could do him in completely. I think that's probably just about the best way ever to end a relationship.\n\n<<back>>