Of Boys and Girls…
I’ve been working quite a bit lately. In an extremely real sense, it feels like I have been living up at the office…eleven to thirteen hour shifts, sleep, rinse, repeat. The life of a salesman during the fourth quarter of the fiscal year. Where are my stock options? Where is my complementary turkey or Christmas basket?
So, in lieu of my common nightly activities, which have involved crashing as soon as possible, I have fought against my better judgment and stayed up tonight to simply enjoy time away from work. I haven’t accomplished anything, but I did experience the most profound of epiphanies while talking to a friend…
The whole thing began when she commented on the poem I posted on here a few days back. She told me that she liked it and, being the high school english teacher that she is, went into a brief description of her thoughts. For whatever reason, the exchange made me want to share with her, so I cracked open the digital archives of my life and did just that. I kept giving her more and more of my writings to read…spanning across a number of years in my youth.
She was subjected to the first recorded poem I ever wrote. A terrible piece of garbage latent with emotions and terms I still do not comprehend…so assuredly the little boy who wrote them did not either. And she began to crack into the archive of her own life and share with me the thoughts and words of other times.
And it dawned on us…we haven’t changed one bit. Sure, the writing grew more crisp and profound as the years went on and we grew into adults, but the thoughts at the core of it all were identical to the feelings and emotions we experience today–now, in the present of our present.
If you were to disconnect from the linearity of time and find that small child I once was, his left hand tirelessly scribbling in spiral notebooks and loose paper, you will find the same fears, hopes, and dreams that I still possess manifest within him. He is me, and I have not changed. None of us have. We grow, and we learn, and we cope…but when you distill us down to the raw materials that form our persona, you discover that they are everlasting.Some of the same themes I have discussed thoroughly on this site were tucked neatly into the blurbs of a ten-year-old’s journal: love, rejection, death, redemption, regret…was I too young for these thoughts or was I destined to always feel them?
You see, I was on a date recently and the beautiful girl who sat across from me told me to never change for anyone…to find someone who likes me for exactly who I am. I thought it was a wonderful statement…as it reminded me of all the times I tried to bend who I was for a relationship and ultimately failed. I had decided a long time ago that I would never change for someone again. I was simply fooling myself…I couldn’t have changed even if I wanted to do so. I am Elliott James Griffin. I always have been and I always will be. I am reminded of the book on the legendary King Arthur entitled “The Once and Future King.” The name of the book is derived from the belief that Arthur was born to rule, a preordained right had been entrusted upon him by the Gods and he was destined to be King. And me, the small child writing of love and loss before he knew them, and the man now left in their tragic wake–the once and future king, Elliott James Griffin. Time is irrelevant. This was decided well before I was born. God made me this way.
And he made you in your own way. You cannot escape it and you cannot change it.
One Response to “Of Boys and Girls…”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
November 29th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
you HAVE changed…
into “l33t death: level 2 sales assassin; killing it on the night shift and putting unworthy callers in their rightful, lowly, place…”
ellohell