Let's Pretend This Will Work

by Maddie Dawson

Trying too hard never works with young people. They need to be treated like hostile, dangerous jungle cats who will slash you if you so much as make uninvited eye contact.

“This is very, very important. Don’t get married to someone who requires that you act quote, unquote, ‘normal’ in order to please him, okay? You don’t have to be anybody’s idea of normal. You’re wonderful and you’re an acquired taste, not just some generic woman who might be a match for just any old random guy. Remember that, and let him see the whole wonderful you. Psychic appointments and all. Just do it before the wedding, rather than after, maybe.”

Just thought of something I meant to tell you long ago: Preparation H is the surefire cure for bags under your eyes! This is a beauty tip from your sweet old ma.

And don’t we all need protection during scary movies and when there are bagpipes threatening?

Maybe conflict doesn’t mean that love is dead. Maybe sometimes it means it’s alive.

“I think she loves him.” “But why?” “Why does she love him? I don’t think love is ever explainable, do you?”

I can feel her intelligence, her awareness, even though her thoughts come bubbling up through corpuscles and nerve endings and feel as though they’ve taken a wrong linguistic turn somewhere before getting to her mouth. She told me the other day that the letter A is blue, and that G and H are yellow. She said that chimneys are where we store anything that matters, and that the blender likes her the best of any family member.

“Well, I just think that when that first love comes along, it brings with it a huge thunderclap of feeling—something so amazing that we get overwhelmed with it. And that it’s tempting to think that it’s the only love there ever could be in the world. But then it ends. Most of the time it ends. And then, a long time later, we look back and see that that whole experience of love was just a little kiddie pool we were paddling around in. And that actually a really huge ocean awaits us.”