he To Him - Part Two

Boo, hiss, she said.

You see, she was not the kind of girl who accepted problems or difficulties well, who handled uncertainty or mysterious empty internal spaces well. She was the kind of girl who found solutions, who solved problems, who fixed things. But how do you find a solution or solve a problem or fix a thing when you don’t know what challenge you are facing looks like, when it has no shape or origin? How do you fight a nameless, shapeless blob of a nothing? And how on earth, she thought, can a nameless, shapeless blob of a nothing hurt you so much?

And then one day suddenly she found herself talking to Him. He wasn’t Him at first of course; in the beginning he was just another him. Just another nice guy who said hello and waved and smiled. Just another nice guy who looked good in ball caps and jeans, in shorts and polo shirts, in flip-flops and t-shirts. He snuck in under her radar, you see, maneuvering around her with great care and meticulous patience, the way a trainer will work a particularly skittish horse. He eased her in to the idea of him – and eventually to the idea of Him – by just being there for the longest time. He became a part of her everyday scenery, a piece of the backdrop of daily life. In this way, whether intentionally or not, he managed her perfectly.

You see, as much as she wanted to solve, manipulate, do, change, address, alter, FIX her life, there was a very real risk that she would never do so. She was, in a word, afraid. Pretty nice people with pretty nice lives may not appear to suffer from great fear – their lives look so attractive and well-assembled that fear seems like a completely untenable emotion to ascribe to them, something so utterly at odds with what is projected to the external world that most people would consider it a laughable word to ascribe to said pretty nice life. After all, when one appears to have everything, what possible problem could they have, right? Wrong.

No one wants everything; where would they put it?

Maggie was no exception. She was very afraid of having everything – or the appearance of everything – for precisely that reason. She had no idea where to put it all. She didn’t know where to put the problems or challenges that she accumulated precisely because her pretty nice, pretty easy life did not allow for the concept of problems or challenges. This is why her “sudden” realization that there Must Be More was so particularly disconcerting; if she could not handle what she had (which admittedly was more than most had), how in heaven’s name would she handle More? She had been accumulating more for so long that this concept struck a chord of nearly nameless terror in her. How big would the missing thing turn out to be? What would it take to make the crumb happy and stop its protestations? And – perhaps most importantly – what if she never figured out what It was that she was missing anyway?

All of these fears aggregated, much more quickly than one might imagine. They started out as a series of Small Annoyances, but quickly assembled themselves into a Major Grievance. And that Major Grievance would likely have been big enough to keep Him away forever, if he hadn’t had the good sense (good fortune? good timing? good luck?) to start out as a him and work his way up to capitalization slowly, over time.

To this day I still don’t know if He did it on purpose or if someone (real, celestial, imaginary, or whatever) whispered in his ear. I will probably never know if he knew me well enough, even then, even before he really knew anything about me, to know how to work his way into my life. I will never ask him – I couldn’t, how would I? And does it really matter anyway? Not at this point, not by now. All that matters now is that he did manage me, perfectly, and managed to go from him to Him in just the right way, in just the right amount of time.

All that matters now is that He is here, now. 

Author Jill-Elizabeth's info and other great stories can be found at http://www.jill-elizabeth.com/