Boob monkeys, small delights, and things that stay still.
An open journal on a wooden table, with a tealight and pen.
Hello big heart.
At the end of Grade 11, my very sweet boyfriend wrote in the back of my yearbook, in tiny script, as if no one could read it but me:
“Sorry I’m such a boob monkey sometimes.”
That phrase, in his meticulous handwriting, came back to me this week, the way a chorus of a much-loved song might drift back in that blurry space between sleep and waking. I dug out my yearbooks and found it there, right where I left it.
Boob monkey.
Can we pause? Is it just me, or is that phrase almost impossibly weird and delightful and somehow … earnest?
This wasn’t something he’d ever said. It wasn’t “our thing.” But it’s what he chose to write that day, a teenage boy with a heart like a disco ball, hunched over a yearbook, in a hallway that smelled like lockers.
This is what words do — they hold us in place while time flings us forward.
It’s been almost three decades since that day in the hall. He and I would break up the next fall, and then his mom would die, a phrase I still can’t look at without a shutter of sadness. Years would pass, wars would wage, the Internet would creep into our consciousness and move everything around, a new generation would appear like a sudden spring.
And all the while, that sentence would stand still, holding a little shred of our silly teenage selves in place. Holding us.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the struggle of writing.
It all feels so confounding and impossible sometimes. The way words define and limit us, hold us apart, make us obscure. The way they’re always here with us — in books and billboards and televised debates. They leak out the windows of passing cars, float over the neighbour’s fence. We are constantly processing.
When you’re someone who cares about words, and wants to make something good with them, the enormity of the task can be numbing. Language is constantly failing us, entirely inadequate for the tasks at hand.
And all the while… boob monkey.
The simple joy of this forces me to remember that words have many tasks. They can delight us, wake us up, remind us of who were are still are. They can cajole smiles onto our faces, new smiles, familiar ones.
Time flows through us, rearranging everything. But words can be tiny time machines, letting us slip backwards and catch glimpses of past wonder.
My wish for you this month is a simple one.
I hope that words lead you back to a room inside yourself you haven’t visited in a long time. I hope there’s great light in there, delicious snacks, glimmers of absurdity and kindness.
And I hope that while you’re there, you remember that there is so much more to you than anyone could know, and any word could hold.
The yearbook is back on my shelf.
The boyfriend moved back to our hometown and lives a few blocks from the high school, where his son will likely get his own locker soon.
I visited a few years ago, and we drove out to the country to see the headstone they erected for his beautiful mom. We stood in a sunny field, looking at her name, letting our eyes pool with the same tears.
Yes. Words hold us in place, even while the world keeps moving forward.
In it with you,
