DowntownRickyBrown
Gazing
I am a gazer; a person who knows that somewhere in the middle distance there are questions to be asked, whether or not they can be answered. For a girl like me, the asking is everything.
For a long while, I kept my thoughts to myself, but people wouldn’t leave me alone. In fifth grade, when Miss Adams insisted I put on my thinking cap, inside, I was screaming, It’s on already! Can’t you see it? I AM thinking! My first serious boyfriend couldn’t take the silence, forever offering me a penny for my thoughts. Like a bribe. We didn’t last because my thoughts were not for sale. In high school, my mom would constantly harass me with, What’s going on inside that pretty head of yours? Nothing, I’d tell her, but it wasn’t true. There was so much going on in there that I couldn’t sleep at night. Deep thoughts, scary thoughts, thoughts that drove me crazy, and big, flashing, light bulb thoughts that made me believe I could change the world.
And then in college I had a professor who said she saw herself in me. She said that in the mornings, on her way to the caf for a coffee, she’d watch me gazing out the window of the student union, taking it all in, turning it around inside my head. You, she said one day as she hurried by. Idea person.
She didn’t ask me what I was thinking. Write it down, she told me. Write it all down.
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