Baobabs
<<2003-04-13 - 3:52 p.m.>>

And then later, when we were lolling about in her social room, drinking tea and doing Hum reading and lobbing innuendo back and forth (the house is to be called the Innuendo, or, alternately, the Innuendo House. Its current name is the Eso, and this Will Not Do), Fury said, in a rather low and muddled voice, something along the lines of "Thanks for coming and hanging out with me, I'm usually much more alone on the weekends and it's sad."

And all this makes me wonder about Miss Fury.

She's known to just about everyone on campus, universally liked, getting asked out (and/or straight-up propositioned) with abundant regularity, involved with several campus groups and events, generally a Known Person around here, even though she's only a freshman. So why is she alone on the weekends? Why did she say that "sometimes living in the dorms can be isolating" when we were discussing the hopes we have for the community feeling in the Innuendo?

And then she mentioned that Katie, her girlfriend, had undergone breast-cancer surgery. How much can one person be expected to bear?

She read seven or eight chapters of The Little Prince aloud last night, and I started to feel a melancholy, a regret, a loss. Maybe it was just the text, the Little Prince so pure in his responsible childhood, the narrator straddling the divide. Any sensible person should be able to tell the difference between a hat and a boa constrictor digesting an elephant, viewed from the outside. Maybe it was Fury's reading, which was excellent, with a high, clipped, poignant voice for the Little Prince, with longing in the narrator's voice. Maybe it was some combination of the text and the reading and the circumstances. Children whose mothers try to kill themselves in the presence of their children rarely have real chidlhoods.

And I didn't have much of a childhood, either. Not the way we always think childhood's supposed to be.

But the Little Prince was a child, and he was taking care of his whole planet. He was taking care of the rosebushes and he had to keep the ground beneath his feet from disintegrating under the wracking influence of the baobabs.

My parents were the baobabs, and they were the planet, too.

The thing is, though, maybe it's just a myth. Maybe every child is trying to hold her planet together. Maybe every child has baobabs.

The other day I was momentarily overwhelmed by how many of my friends have "eating issues." How universal my pain is. Sometimes it seems like people who are calm and collected and well-adjusted and confident and happy without having some Achilles heel, some secret shame, are one in a million. Maybe everyone has to prune their baobabs diligently, and maybe there's no end in sight. Maybe there will always be baobabs.

But maybe in the future, I (we) will have sheep in boxes. I don't know if the sheep turns out well yet. Perhaps the sheep will eat the rosebushes. Perhaps only hand-pruning will do.

Each child, on her own planet, pruning her own malevolent baobabs and feeling as if she is the only child whose planet the baobabs have chosen to attack.

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