Inner (child) Monologue
Oh wow! Lookit…Over by the dumpster.
What? The box? Yeah, somebody must have gotten a new refrigerator.
Let’s build a fort.
Excuse me?
Let’s get the box and build a fort. You could totally fit in that thing.
I’m not building a cardboard fort. I’m 27 years old.
C’mon. It’ll be fun. And whimsical. You like whimsy.
I think I can safely say that I have already fulfilled my whimsical obligations for the summer. I went to the zoo no less than five times, fed ducks at the pond, AND I built sandcastles at the beach last month.
You only did that because you were hoping some bohemian artist type would see you grubbing around in the dirt wearing a bikini, and fall in love with the “glow of child-like wonder” in your eyes.
Shut up!
Please. It wasn’t even that great of a sandcastle.
It had a moat.
You didn’t even do anything when those little kids stomped on it while their mother cheered them on.
What was I supposed to do? Yell at a 5 year old? Yeah, that’d be just great…The scary tattooed lady makes a pair of toddlers cry and slaps their mother for not teaching them to stay the fuck off other people’s sand property. Whatever.
So you gonna grab that box, or what? I figure we start by cutting a few circular holes down one side…Upright, it’s a spaceship. On its side, a submarine!
I’m not getting the box.
And we could run down to Walgreen’s and buy some markers, make it look really sharp…
Listen, that box has been sitting in a pool of alley water and garbage juice for god-knows-how-long, it’s dirty, it’s damp, it’s…
Or, or, check this out: We cut out the top so it looks like the turret of a castle, spend the day defending ourselves from the Gauls. Huh?
Listen. I CAN’T do this. I can’t anymore. This cutesy-little-girl shit is killing me. I don’t want to look at the world as something new and magical everyday. I don’t want to be the breezy free spirit living on a different planet. I’ve got a lot of shit going on and all the fucking cardboard forts in the world aren’t going to change that. I’m tired of being “delightfully eccentric.” I want to be like everybody else. This is just…I can’t anymore. It’s just too hard.
Okay?
Okay?
It was a good box.
Yeah, it was. I know. I’m sorry.
So I didn’t get the box.
I wish I had.