Sunday Scribblings Post- Prompt "Theme"
Theme
For so many people the overriding theme of their lives is fitting in. It doesn't matter if they're capable of conformity or not, they will do their best to adhere to an unattainable standard of normalcy dictated by a nebulous, judgemental faction known as “them”. It happens all the time and it sucks the joy and love out of those people until they're nothing but miserable husks struggling to angle through a life of just existing.
I gave up on the idea of normal a long time ago. I couldn't be the girl who liked dinosaurs and wrote all the time and try to pretend that I fit in with everyone. And him, well, he'd tell you he never found any kind of definition of that word that told him what it really was, so he didn't give it much thought. He can't even manage average most of the time, not when we're clothes shopping, not when we get a vehicle, not when we look at furniture, his height is always a factor. About the only things he can buy just like everyone else are tattoos, shoes, and earrings, and even saying he can buy shoes is a stretch. We can find them, but that's because he already knows where to look. Normal is always going to be a setting on the appliances for us, because that's the only place standard really applies with any kind of meaning.
Our theme is, most likely, trust. We both understand that neither of us offers that gift lightly. We had to come to a point where we both agreed to share our worlds with each other. He knows that the characters that live in my head have to be a part of our lives as much as the machines that he's building or repairing have to be involved, too. Emotion and expression do not typically go hand in hand and I don't expect him to react the same way I do to things and he doesn't expect me to reciprocate his responses. That may make our theme acceptance, of each other mostly, our quirks and idiosyncracies, the habits, good and bad, that shape who we are. That doesn't mean we like them all or even that we tolerate them with anything resembling grace, it just means that we recognize it's a necessary component of being together. He mumbles about odd scraps of paper now permanently adhered to the dining room table as much as I make noise about his game controller cords stretched across the living room floor.
None of those small annoyances indicates that we don't love each other, or that we don't want to be together any more. It just means that we have to remember those things that make us want to stay, and that's easy enough when we can still find so many reasons to smile at each other.
For so many people the overriding theme of their lives is fitting in. It doesn't matter if they're capable of conformity or not, they will do their best to adhere to an unattainable standard of normalcy dictated by a nebulous, judgemental faction known as “them”. It happens all the time and it sucks the joy and love out of those people until they're nothing but miserable husks struggling to angle through a life of just existing.
I gave up on the idea of normal a long time ago. I couldn't be the girl who liked dinosaurs and wrote all the time and try to pretend that I fit in with everyone. And him, well, he'd tell you he never found any kind of definition of that word that told him what it really was, so he didn't give it much thought. He can't even manage average most of the time, not when we're clothes shopping, not when we get a vehicle, not when we look at furniture, his height is always a factor. About the only things he can buy just like everyone else are tattoos, shoes, and earrings, and even saying he can buy shoes is a stretch. We can find them, but that's because he already knows where to look. Normal is always going to be a setting on the appliances for us, because that's the only place standard really applies with any kind of meaning.
Our theme is, most likely, trust. We both understand that neither of us offers that gift lightly. We had to come to a point where we both agreed to share our worlds with each other. He knows that the characters that live in my head have to be a part of our lives as much as the machines that he's building or repairing have to be involved, too. Emotion and expression do not typically go hand in hand and I don't expect him to react the same way I do to things and he doesn't expect me to reciprocate his responses. That may make our theme acceptance, of each other mostly, our quirks and idiosyncracies, the habits, good and bad, that shape who we are. That doesn't mean we like them all or even that we tolerate them with anything resembling grace, it just means that we recognize it's a necessary component of being together. He mumbles about odd scraps of paper now permanently adhered to the dining room table as much as I make noise about his game controller cords stretched across the living room floor.
None of those small annoyances indicates that we don't love each other, or that we don't want to be together any more. It just means that we have to remember those things that make us want to stay, and that's easy enough when we can still find so many reasons to smile at each other.