I wonder, off and on, but always, if anyone will ever know me. I like getting to know people, and I want to listen. I aim to be and I can honestly say I am perceptive. I notice. I remember. Yet I have been scratching my head trying to remember the last time someone said anything to try and really get to know me. I am not sure there exists yet a person who has ever asked me anything very personal. And I want to bring up the definition of personal as “of, affecting, or belonging to a particular person rather than to anyone else.” Not my politics, because that can be shared with someone else, not my job, which is not unique to me, not my preferences for food and movies because others share those as well.
Personal. Just one person has it. We all have things about us that are just ours to share, but how often are we sharing it? And how do you even go about sharing something like that? If I bring it up, I’m spotlighting myself and it feels borderline disingenuous because it just isn’t a very natural thing to give yourself away. Someone would have to ask, I think, for it to feel natural. Yet my frustration is in the one-sidedness where I frequently ask others to tell me more about themselves and receive beautiful answers, while I am unnasked on the other side.
I feel like I am bubbling inside with these snippets about me to share with someone who will never ask, never care to know. Like how I write all my Fs in cursive because I read an old love letter when I was in college and the woman in the letter was very well-loved by her suitor. She wrote her Fs in a very particular way and it might be silly but I thought maybe if I wrote my Fs like that forever, one day I would find someone who thought of me in that way too. I borrowed that little fragment of that woman’s life and brought it into mine and it took on new meaning for me. Training my hand to write every F that way took a while, but I made sure it became a habit and now it is part of my handwriting. I secretly hope for a love that can be appreciated centuries after it is over with every handwritten note I make, and that is something very personal. That is me, and nobody will ever ask but I wish someone would.
I think that’s why I write. It has to be because there is a chance that if I write things like that here, someone might see it. And they might see themselves in that too, or connect with it for a moment. And in that connection that’s what I’m longing for, to be known. I write to be known by others in the way people could not possibly know I have been waiting for them to, so I leave it up to chance. Maybe you see this, maybe you are just the right person to see this and you understand. I hope someone understands because I just don’t think I can be alone in this.
Do we just go around asking personal questions? Is that even crazy to ask for? It feels kind of like it is, right now.
Prattle Peach 