LJ 101 BW: Week 3

He Hasn't Told Her He Loves Her

I was SO excited when I got the prompt for this piece. Professor Burke asked us to find a place like a closet, bathroom, or someone's bedroom and write a piece a la Talese or O'Brien. Talese's piece was about New York. He wrote about it as if it were a living person, and it felt like he was taking us for a walk through its streets. O'Brien's piece was from an excerpt of The Things They Carried and about all the different types of baggage soldiers "carry" with them: weapons, burdens, their lives. I tried to combine both techniques. Talese uses the contents of New York to describe it as a place, and how the people in it define it and how the city defines them as well. O'Brien's piece has a lot of repetition and is a representation of how people are defined by objects they associate themselves with. My mother always said that you can get to know a woman by the contents of her purse. I chose to do my boyfriend's room, and I enjoyed sifting through all his stuff. He's quite the pack rat and kept a lot of stuff that I never thought he would've. Enjoy reading about how weird he is.

He hasn’t told her he loves her.

He isn’t Chad Danforth, nor is he Corbin Bleu as he is often asked on his various trips to Disneyland. He doesn’t have a red Wildcat’s jersey in his closet; his is black with a white number four because it’s his favorite number. He doesn’t sing or dance in front of people, but he’ll sing Taylor Swift shirtless and sway violently at a John Legend concert with his girlfriend. He didn’t attend East High in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but he did attend the Banning High on the sweater he lent his girlfriend, a small old Western town just outside of Palm Springs. He doesn’t smile with his teeth, instead he smirks. His curls are slowly turning into dreads and he’s perfectly OK with it as long as they stay out of his eyes when he plays basketball. “He has the hair, and he plays basketball, but he doesn’t sing or dance,” says his girlfriend. “Two out of four ain’t too bad.”

His room is the one at the end of the hallway, and from the living room you can barely make out a 30 year old TV on the carpet, and a dark wooden shelf he has moved to the floor. His DVD collection isn’t extensive, but it’s a reflection of his quiet sense of humor as evidenced by the constant smirk on his face. Me, Myself, and Irene is what makes him say, “Fuck my ozone!” to various litterbugs and smokers. He’ll sit through Twilight even though he is Team Jacob. He wants a girl like Mandy Moore in A Walk to Remember, and wants to take her on a spontaneous day trip by plane like Jim Carey did with Zooey Deschanel in Yes Man. Aladdin is the reason he asks her, “Do you trust me?” when he holds out his hand to help her out of the car. He lets her keep her Wedding Singer DVD up there, and would never tell her to get out of his Van Halen t-shirt before she jinxes the band and they break up.

His beige carpet is littered with the ends of his dreds that squirm like furry caterpillars each time his bedroom door open or closes. He has a bad habit of pulling them out in his sleep. He has a shoebox full of NBA trading cards: Vlade Divac, Dennis Rodman, Scottie Pippen, and Eddie Jones. His boombox lies underneath the air conditioner next to her red Fender Esquire she hasn’t played since back in 8th grade when she wanted to be Michelle Branch. She brought it because he wanted to learn, but it was soon replaced by his acoustic Art and Lutherie folk guitar he got from his mentor because as his license plate on his black truck says, “ROB ROCKS.” It has a Canadian flag sticker and is made of cedar making it a shade lighter than normal. He likes that it looks different. On Valentine’s Day, he took her to Build A Bear where she made Cuddlebug, an overstuffed wolf that wears a Charger’s jersey. Next to Cuddlebug is a small stuffed white dog with a crooked nose that he named after her. She asks how long he’s named it that and he says: since he made it up. Next to them lie her laptop, her book bag, her printer, and her jackets. He lets her hang her Derek Fisher jersey in his closet along with the rest of her clothes even though he’s still mad about the Denver game.

His Kobe poster is the first thing you see when you enter his walk in closet. He stands with his legs spread, his face showing no emotion, and menacingly palms the ball at his side in his right hand. On some days he doesn’t mind the poster, but other days he wants to punch it. “He forces it sometimes.” He lets her keep her baby blue Hyperdunks next to his black Kobe IV’s. He moved his roommate’s armoire into his closet because he got new furniture. He doesn’t really need it, but it’s nice to have it there. Inside it he has books, pens, pencils, cologne he never has to use because he keeps himself so clean he never smells. Even his sweat smells good he claims, and he’ll let you smell his armpits after a game of basketball to prove it. His bathroom has deodorant for his light colored shirts and one for his dark colored ones; he has body wash for after he plays basketball, and after a normal day at school. Overall he’s a pretty clean guy, but his feet and the seas of dirty laundry suggest something different. He has underwear he calls his “smalls” because they are the size of tighty whities, and he constantly has to pull them down to keep from getting a wedgie when he plays, but he doesn’t wear them as much anymore because she covers her eyes when he does. On top of the armoire are old receipts, a birthday pin from Disneyland that says Josh, tickets from the John Legend concert they went to for her birthday, the notes she’d leave on his car when they were mad and not talking to each other, the picture they took at Medieval Times on the Valentine’s Day he over planned and made his roommates’ girlfriends jealous, and old love letters back from when they were courting. She wrote one about how all the things she hated about him were also the things she loved. “I hate how you push me to the edge of the bed,” she started, “but it’s OK because it’s usually just because you want to cuddle.” He kept them all.

If his body is his temple, his bed must be some type of divine being. No one is allowed to touch its off white IKEA sheets, her Transformers blanket, his red comforter, her Beauty and the Beast one with the matching pillowcases he proudly shows to the lucky few who get to see the inside of his room, or the pink blanket she has slept with since the day her parents carried her out of the hospital. She has to change out of her civilian attire and take naps in her PJ’s. He keeps a gallon of hand soap refill under his sink because they have to wash their hands before they eat, and after they eat because they’ve touched fast food containers that sometimes pile up on his desk. On his desk, he has a black planner his mentor bought for him. Carefully scribbled are the dates of his finals and midterms, the time he has specified to read for class or go to the ARC, and occasionally her handwriting designating time for cuddling and buying cupcakes. He didn’t bother to cross them out.

He’s hung a couple of other things on his walls above his desk. One is a picture she drew for him freshman year before she liked him, but the heart shaped basketball and Defensive X’s and Offensive O’s tell a different story. Another is one his niece drew of them both riding roller skates on grass. Her orange skin and pencil hair are strong contrasts to his brown skin and brown mop of curls. She realized they were different at a much earlier age. It wasn’t until middle school that he discovered that he wasn’t white. Next to those are a Taylor Swift poster from the CD he bought her, and he’s more excited than she is to see her in concert on Thursday. He has all of her songs on his black Compaq laptop, along with a never ending supply of Lil Wayne which he claims to have grown out of. His music collection is about as strange as his movie one. It ranges from the vulgarity of Eminem to the Alan Jackson he likes to play for his girlfriend while she naps. She only knows about the new country, whereas he grew up listening to the classics. His desktop background is a repeating picture of Ellen Paige resting her head on a basketball. She’s cute but not as cute as his girlfriend; he keeps pictures of her on his desktop and his cell phone that plays “Special girl, real cool girl. Biggest thing in my itty bitty world” from “Vivrant Thang by Q-Tip whenever she calls. She only gets to here it when she has to call his phone when he’s lost it.

He still hasn’t told her he loves her.



-Kristen Viray April 16, 2009