Unsolicited: A Story In Zero Acts

I am trying not to be meddlesome. Truly, I am. It is difficult and I’ve probably overstepped already. Me, my magic wand and the horse I rode in on. I am always digging in people’s heads. Compiling dossiers of facts and feelings that I rifle through and mentally update each time we talk. Climbing all over you like you’re a jungle gym. Working my emotional alchemy to come up with what I feel is just the right elixir to heal what ails. Maybe I tell you what I’ve figured out and maybe I don’t.

It’s probably better if I don’t.

I repeat my mantra about never adopting strays. I remind myself that I’m not in the market for interpersonal fixer-upper projects. And yet, a few words would solve this. If you thought about it like that. But what if you just… Hold still while I fix your collar. I bite my tongue. The impulse to advise, to cheerlead, to tinker, to grab you by the shoulders and tell you about the whole damn world full of Technicolor potential and tie-dyed possibility and don’t you want to LIVE already? comes from a good place, but it isn’t my place. Not these days. I remind myself that no one here knows about my secret life of internet prescriptivism. Nobody asks, maybe nobody even wonders. And, of course, I don’t volunteer, because there’s no way to tell it that doesn’t start with, “Once upon a time, I was someone neat…”

Instead, I just watch out of the corner of my eye and when you turn away, I tuck my little file back in the drawer until next time.