Old Stuff 3

The Grass is Green:
This week, Ian is moving in with his girlfriend. Ian and Katie have gone out part-time, on and off, and in between for three years and the time feels right. Ian’s friends tell him he should be nervous, probably because he’s lived alone for six years and might have trouble readjusting to sharing a space, but the idea feels pretty cozy to him. It’s at least partly because of the lawn. Ian is the kind of person that can really flourish with a project and if it’s a project without an easy outcome, then even better. Ian stands in the middle of the front lawn, taking a break as boxes trickle into her three bedroom house near the college, reflecting on the ways the grass and his relationship with Katie are very similar.
The grass looks dead. The color fits the image nicely: a pasty-in-spots white. There are patches where the grass has gone completely; leaving bald spots of dirt that, in all-too-telling ways, let Ian know that Katie has been using the front lawn as an alternative to the driveway. Katie’s driveway is the width of a single car and, on days where visiting friends or former roommates are parked behind her car, in effect trapping her car against the garage, she might make a hard left over her front lawn and use her next door neighbor’s driveway to connect to the street.
Tire tread marks tell stories in the dirt, forming symmetrical y-patterns that depend on whether her path was a straight one or curved; made necessary by the neighbor parking farther than normal from his own garage. Ian started to water the lawn a few days before he began to move boxes.
Ian met Katie on a local amateur theater production. Well, that’s not true. They actually met six years before that when she dated the guitarist/singer of the band for which Ian played piano. They talked a few times and she seemed very nice, but nothing really sparkled for them and their paths didn’t cross much outside of shows and then she and Ryan broke up and, admittedly, Ian and Katie kind of forgot about each other. In the fall of 2003, they both arrive for the first night of rehearsal on an annual production of Richard O’Brien’s “The Rocky Horror Show.” They identified each other quickly. Awkward glances were followed with “Do I know you?” and “You look familiar.” and similar sentiments led to their moment of realization. They filed the following weeks with a fair amount of flirting until Ian finally asked her out on the slowly forming stage between scenes. A week, maybe a week and a half later and they were in Katie’s apartment and Ian was rubbing her feet. They got comfortable fast and as Ian was getting ready to leave, they kissed for the first time. Ian thought she smelled like an entire aisle at Bath and Bodyworks and he was, as they say, a goner.
There are green spots forming on the grass at Katie’s house while Ian continues the conversion of his writing room. Ian finds moving in together exciting because of love and companionship and all that good stuff, but a real bonus for him is getting a room to turn into a study. Ian’s liked writing as long as he can remember. His early to mid-twenties are characterized by bouncing from apartment to apartment in a fairly normal bid to find himself. As Ian got more serious about writing in college, though, he knew he’d want a great space in which to do it. In Katie’s house, the opportunity greets him earlier than expected meaning, he supposes, that he’d gotten to picturing himself at forty-plus, married with children, sitting down at some theoretical desk with a pipe in how mouth for added effect, ready to churn out some words. At a comparatively baby-faced twenty eight, sweat beading on his brow from lifting the box with the computer in it, Ian feels like he’s getting a few extra years of writing advantage on his imaginary future-self and plans to make the most of these extra years before carpal tunnel syndrome sets in. Ian looks around a room that may witness births of novels, plays, short stories, and screenplays. It’s currently empty but for four boxes underneath a mid-sized window on the far wall.
Katie and Ian officially became a couple quickly after their first kiss and, after throwing caution to the wind and some really nice times, they were ready for a break after six months. Those who are apt to scratch their heads at this moment in the narrative have a strong sense of what Ian and Katie’s friends felt as they broke up and re-united three times over the next two years. Anxiety and unanswered questions, like Ian wanting to move to Alaska when college is done and Katie still having two years left and who believed or didn’t believe what about higher beings in the universe, would drive them apart and, whenever it became apparent to the two of them that they felt pretty crummy when they were apart and that the questions tearing at them didn’t need immediate answers, they would resolve to try it again.
As a writer, Ian was always looking for that one moment that would explain everything about his relationship with his girlfriend as though they were part of a short story that was reaching its climax. That moment always escaped him. Viewing their history as a story, Ian thought that the scene in Katie’s apartment was nice and that it wrapped all the excitement and promise of a new relationship into itself. Ian’s current pre-occupation with his girlfriend’s lawn has begun to eat at him because he thinks there is something worth saying that would put the kibosh on the tiny bit of anxiety he is, admittedly, experiencing facing such a big commitment for him. The grass was growing in nicely where there had been dirt before and, while Ian and Katie still had days where they just need time away from each other because they’re so talented at driving each other nuts while at the same time enjoying that fact because it means they know each other very well if they can sufficiently estimate which pushed buttons will do what, the two of them want to be together. Ian rolls his eyes as he sits down at the desk in his study and turns on the computer. The room has come to include a two-person couch, a very tall bookshelf, and a prized chair from IKEA store that Ian purchased while in San Diego visiting his Dad. It feels like home. Committing himself to another person might not be realistic, but it does feel good.
“A published memoir or short story is not a lie, but it is polished,” Ian writes. “How often, as a reader, do you hear the writer admit they have no clue what they’re talking about? But I don’t want to edit what I’m talking about, ‘cause if I do, then I won’t get to that nugget, that bit of truth lying in the middle of all this rambling and…”
His fingers stop doing their work and Ian’s train of thought ends. Ian gets up and moves the sprinkler he’d left running from the front yard to the side yard. “Twenty minutes, okay? Don’t over water…” he think to himself. He is back at his desk with a glass of water that goes untouched when his train of thought picks up, again, and he starts to write.
“If I make the choice to treat this relationship like a bit of free writing, where everything isn’t perfect or planned, then I think it has a chance. Real life is like a paragraph that’s a little wordy and cumbersome. It might be sloppy and messy at times but it’s definitely filled with those great moments and sparkling sentences that one could throw out at a dinner party to impress your fellow writers. To create the illusion you know what you’re doing and talking about with any uncertainty covered up by moments of feeling loved and cared for so that the exclusion of such angst is a willing one that rewards you. Is writing a good relationship anything else in the end?”
Ian slides his chair back across the wooden floor and goes to start the dishes, smiling. If he hurries, the lawn will be watered, the dishes will be done, and he can light a couple of her favorite candles before Katie gets home from work.