Statuesque (Work in Progress)
I have never been in love. My father used to tell me stories about when he first fell in love, with a mermaid he met at Venice Beach when he was fourteen. She’d beached herself, he said, and turned herself human for an hour in that way that mermaids could. She couldn’t speak, of course, and he only knew her long enough to lift her lithe, beautiful body in his awkward, skinny arms and carry her down to the surf. It wasn’t a long time, he always said, recounting the story wistfully (and only on nights when mom wasn’t home,) but he had known, then and there, what true love felt like. He’d go on to say that he was always grateful to that mermaid, because that’s how he knew when he first fell for my mom.
But that’s not something I’ve ever wanted. It seemed...silly, frivolous and time-consuming. I just wanted to be ordinary, and if the stories I grew up with were any indication, falling in love was anything but. Which is why, fresh from four ordinary years at NYU, with a degree in art history (minor in studio art) tossed lovingly into some box in my new apartment, I set about finding an ordinary job. This proved to be more troublesome than I’d expected, as it turned out. At the start of the summer, I’d applied for about fifty internships, and since the majority of them were in New York, I figured moving there was a pretty safe bet. Five months later, I’d been rejected from all but one. The Met. I was doomed. However, my roommate, Marco, was very supportive when I expressed my fears to him.
“No wonder you can’t get a job, O’Brien,” he’d chuckled from the couch, where he was sharpening his knives. “They already got people to stare at art. They’re called tourists.”
Marco had started out studying biology on a pre-med track, but he’d had this weird, life-affirming experience about four months into his sophomore year. He was at a party one night, completely wasted, and the girl he was trying to impress said she was hungry. To hear him tell it, he just started throwing things in the kitchen together, and after an hour he had created something that everyone present swore was the best thing they’d ever tasted. The next day he dropped out of NYU and enrolled himself in culinary school. I had no idea whether the legend of the party was true or not, but he was a good cook now, and I much preferred tasting his new dishes to helping him memorize anatomy.
I have never been in love. My father used to tell me stories about when he first fell in love, with a mermaid he met at Venice Beach when he was fourteen. She’d beached herself, he said, and turned herself human for an hour in that way that mermaids could. She couldn’t speak, of course, and he only knew her long enough to lift her lithe, beautiful body in his awkward, skinny arms and carry her down to the surf. It wasn’t a long time, he always said, recounting the story wistfully (and only on nights when mom wasn’t home,) but he had known, then and there, what true love felt like. He’d go on to say that he was always grateful to that mermaid, because that’s how he knew when he first fell for my mom.
But that’s not something I’ve ever wanted. It seemed...silly, frivolous and time-consuming. I just wanted to be ordinary, and if the stories I grew up with were any indication, falling in love was anything but. Which is why, fresh from four ordinary years at NYU, with a degree in art history (minor in studio art) tossed lovingly into some box in my new apartment, I set about finding an ordinary job. This proved to be more troublesome than I’d expected, as it turned out. At the start of the summer, I’d applied for about fifty internships, and since the majority of them were in New York, I figured moving there was a pretty safe bet. Five months later, I’d been rejected from all but one. The Met. I was doomed. However, my roommate, Marco, was very supportive when I expressed my fears to him.
“No wonder you can’t get a job, O’Brien,” he’d chuckled from the couch, where he was sharpening his knives. “They already got people to stare at art. They’re called tourists.”
Marco had started out studying biology on a pre-med track, but he’d had this weird, life-affirming experience about four months into his sophomore year. He was at a party one night, completely wasted, and the girl he was trying to impress said she was hungry. To hear him tell it, he just started throwing things in the kitchen together, and after an hour he had created something that everyone present swore was the best thing they’d ever tasted. The next day he dropped out of NYU and enrolled himself in culinary school. I had no idea whether the legend of the party was true or not, but he was a good cook now, and I much preferred tasting his new dishes to helping him memorize anatomy.
posted by Inkaholic at 9:47 PM
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