roll your eyes at this

9
I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds. On the morning of his departure he put his planet in perfect order. He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. He possessed two active volcanoes; and they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning. He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, “One never knows!” So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney. On our earth we are obviously much too small to clean out our volcanoes. That is why they bring no end of trouble upon us. The little prince also pulled up, with a certain sense of dejection, the last little shoots of the baobabs. He believed that he would never want to return. But on this last morning all these familiar tasks seemed very precious to him. And when he watered the flower for the last time, and prepared to place her under the shelter of her glass globe, he realized that he was very close to tears.
“Goodbye,” he said to the flower. But she made no answer. “Goodbye,” he said again.
The flower coughed. But it was not because she had a cold. “I have been silly,” she said to him, at last.
“I ask your forgiveness. Try to be happy …”
He was surprised by this absence of reproaches. He stood there all bewildered, the glass globe held arrested in mid-air. He did not understand this quiet sweetness.
“Of course I love you,” the flower said to him. “It is my fault that you have not known it all the while. That is of no importance. But you—you have been just as foolish as I. Try to be happy … Let the glass globe be. I don’t want it any more.”
“But the wind—”
“My cold is not so bad as all that … The cool night air will do me good. I am a flower.”
“But the animals—”
“Well, I must endure the presence of two or three caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful. And if not the butterflies—and the caterpillars—who will call upon me? You will be far away … As for the large animals—I am not at all afraid of any of them. I have my claws.” And, naïvely, she showed her four thorns. Then she added: “Don’t linger like this. You have decided to go away. Now go!”
For she did not want him to see her crying. She was such a proud flower …



In a way, we remind me of that children’s story – The Little Prince, I said in one hefty letter to him. Pages, front and back are already filled with even, scripted scrawling, a numeral on the top corner of each page circled. The part with the flower of course, how vain, how utterly inevitable though, I’m predisposed to think of myself in these conceited ways, sadly, like my penchant for breaking things metaphorically or otherwise it is just in my nature. Her thorns, the way she brandished them as though they really were as sharp as that hypothetical tiger’s claws, four thorns to protect her against everything in the entire universe. Of course, The Prince thinks of this as naive, but that is because this story is written by a Frenchman who was more likely than not, the very tender and emotional sort. When those sorts have their dander up it’s pointless to try and tell them that having a thin veneer of toughness over their otherwise tender underbellies is pointless given how transparent and thin that veneer is. It’s a moment where vulnerability and boyish grumpiness combine in a way that is entirely attractive, hopelessly infuriating, and probably uniquely French as well.

The way The Prince swears that the flower would let itself die; just to humiliate him further, for some reason only makes me smile with fondness. Maybe I’m just secretly an agent of discord. I don’t know if I can boast being a free thinker, even creatively. I love to absorb the work of others; the mythologies, worlds, and stories in books, but to go so far as to think up my own – the task is so big; the very idea of building your very own universe I’m afraid I wouldn’t know where to even begin. My first thought in the task of creating the universe differs from God’s. He said ‘let there be light’ and my mind immediately falls to what the ground of this new universe will look like. The ground of our universe, although I’m sure there’s more ground then we’ll ever be able to cover to see for ourselves, is basically the same. Terra firma, be it snow, sand, or grass beneath our actual feet. The ground is the ground, is the ground, is what I am essentially saying. Even the moon, with its pallid gray rocks and pebbles, has the same air about it, when looking at the ground at least. The ground is the ground, is the ground. Can you imagine if it wasn’t? Which is why I could never go so far as to think up an entire universe on my own, you see.   

 I’ll become your footnote. Isn’t that what any of us can hope to ever be to another person. In one moment a lover, or a best friend, or someone who stirred up enough shit for us to make us remember them. Slowly the progression happens and in the end all we become is footnotes in the bigger book in someone else’s life. I didn’t want to be nothing more than a footnote to him, even now, years after the fact my own first love is still more than just a footnote. He’s several footnotes but maybe in time as everything I do expands in it’s weight and gravity because I’m supposed to be an adult, he’ll really just become on tiny reference with an itty bitty number beside it leading to one or two eloquent and factual sentences at the bottom of the page. Perhaps not even alone there, but joined by other footnotes from my life at the time. And that is what I’ll become to him as time passes. Maybe it’ll happen very soon. Maybe I was never anything more than just a footnote. I wanted to be a paragraph, I’m not so delusional to think I deserve a whole page, or even more unimaginably, a chapter. A paragraph could be enough for me to be happy, it’s dignified enough, it’s appropriate. But just a footnote? The idea is absolutely crushing to me.