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Hollow-Holler

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2004-04-16 - 5:17 p.m.

During the drive home, I thought a lot about the time when I was young at the zoo, and I witnessed the birth of a giraffe. It was plainly an intense experience, and I cried out when the mother immediatly rejected her glistening ilk. She kicked him away with her hind legs. The keeper said that it was normal, it was a way that mother's prepared their offspring for the brutalities of the wild. It was probably true, but instinctively, I did not believe him. Mothers couldn't do that, and I felt that very strongly. Evolutionary theory would say that babies were created to be cute, so that they are not rejected by their care givers. Adorability as a survival tactic.

I remember how passionately I felt about my mother becoming pregnant with my little brother. I couldn't believe the betrayal, I wanted my mom to take it all back. I didn't want him at all, being a comfort creature. My mother never enrolled me in preschool, because we liked to spend our days together, and later, our mornings were spent together before I went to afternoon kidnergarten. We would watch Donahue, with hot chocolate and buttered toast dipped in, but that would all be gone now. I would have to leave the house that I had always known in order to make room for the cursed child. I hated him before I knew him. Of course I loved him immediately, but I didn't like him. I still felt the annoyance, the bitter burn of this new position as 'older child' that had been thrust on my shoulders. Unreasonably jealous, very resentful. But I remember very vividly the moment that I accepted him. I was in our front yard, reading 'The Little Princess' beneath a tree on my patchwork tied quilt, my pretty copy with the pink paperback cover and the cameo portrait. I could see that Noah was toddling towards me, at the time he was probably two, and I was seven. I tried to ignore him, but he crawled up to me and put his hands on my crossed legs, and my eyes fell on them. They were so tiny, his fingernails just little miniatures! It was like I finally understood what the big deal was all about. This beast was a marvel! Red in the little creases where his hands felt pressure from the weight he was placing on them, and he was looking at my face. I plucked him up, and kissed his hands, and felt a responsibility well up in me.

Remarkable is the manner of connection I made with a young man yesterday. It's made me feel like a truer person, because I don't believe that I have any 'type'. That I can make a connection with a person based on their person, and not their interests, or their hair(though this boy's hair was honestly angelic, painful), or the jokes that they tell. It makes me feel nice, that I was satiated physically by just sleeping on perpendicular sofas, heads apart, and feet in varying states of entanglement. Nuzzling feet, ankles trapped between this boy's. I fought that point where your body tells you to take him into the bathroom and kiss on him in the empty bathtub, and so I walked away unscathed, enriched even, not feeling weird, or sad that i'll probably never see him again.

He couldn't believe how much I reminded him of his 9th grade english teacher.