Natalie was one of my best friends. She had “Ornery” tattooed on her arm. Ornery meaning, cantankerous, ill tempered, irritable. The thing is, she wasn’t ornery at all… she was quite sweet and generous. If I was going to pick the word tattooed on her arm, I would have chosen something different, but I didn’t get to choose her word, and her word was Ornery.
We became close, so close in fact that I have a sneaky suspicion that her Ornery may have rubbed off on me. Between the two of us, I am the one who is ill tempered and irritable.
Natalie? She was soft and forgiving. It was me who was always seeking the forgiveness.
I didn’t like being touched but she would let me lay my head in her lap when I was sad, staring at that word; ‘Ornery’. I began to think she got it knowing that one day she would meet me.
But our meeting was blighted.
If you asked around, you’d be told that it involved a playlist, a route tracking running app and a suicide attempt that ended an entire internship program. That’s what everyone thought. That was the word on the street. That was the hot gossip.
That’s what I let everyone believe, because I was… ornery.
Natalie didn’t say anything against me, because she was not.
Do you see the irony now?
There’s a scale I have to explain, this scale between purity and hedonism. Well, we fall on opposite sides to each other. Not to everyone, but to each other.
We didn’t talk after that.
and then eventually we did, because she’s soft and forgiving.
And I needed forgiveness.
Natalie’s other tattoo said something about unpacking things. I don’t remember the exact phrase, and don’t feel like texting her because then I’d have to explain this blog. She’d want to read it, because she loves to do that…unpack things. When I wrote that first paragraph about a month ago, she messaged me again for the first time in a long time.
Like I wrote her back to life.
I’m always writing people back into existence, it’s like they can feel me type.
Like somehow my words are able to do what I wish I could.
There’s probably something to unpack there, but I can’t be bothered.
I’d just let Natalie do it if I could.
Natalie is happy now, as she deserves to be. If she were here, I would ask to lay my head in her lap again and look back over at ‘Ornery’.
Because I need to, because she’d let me.
Maybe if I tried hard enough, I could change the word for both of us.
Rewrite history, replace Ornery with ‘Sorry’.
Maybe she could have gotten that word instead, knowing that one day I would be.
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Lil’ snack: friday night pizza