Angela Townsend | nonfiction | Against Type

 
 
 
Against Type 


I tell you, I do not have a type.

If you forced me, under penalty of cold molded mustard sandwiches for life, I would tell you that it’s the nexus of Paul Rudd and Emmanuel Macron, which is to say, small, dark, and sweet-faced. Or Alan Alda c. 1977.

But I tell you, I do not have a type. 

These days, I do not even want a typewriter, not if it has dastardly plans for love letters or conspiracies of coffee dates. I want to be the snow leopard on her peaceful mountain.

I am not convinced that mountains shared can be mountains peaceful, even if your leopard husband is Alan Alda c. 1977.

I believed, once. I believed too much, or rather I believed the wrong much, while believing I was too much and not much, all at once. You can see why I am drawn to small and friendly.

Even long before the mountains burned and the snow smoked, my heart belonged to the bashful and the pocket-sized, the quickly-kind and the rumpled. 

The tallest girl in the third grade only had eyes for Eddie, a gentle gerbil who would fit under other boys’ arms like a baguette.

My college statue cracked for Miguel, Venezuela’s effervescent export, six thousand smiles under five feet, six inches.

When I picture myself in a snowbank with someone sweet, he is always juicy concentrate, pulpy and attentive in a small carton.

Or he’s Alan Alda c. 1977, who I once dreamed made me grilled cheese in my grandmother’s kitchen.

But the picture is misted these days, lacy frost forming a protective calligraphy. I turn away and write letters in my own longhand. I turn inward and let the tall girl stretch her long, spotted legs. 

I yearn for nothing so much as my own life, for the first time in my life.

I know my neuroses, and they tower like abominable snow women, as personal as pain. But I also know I am shaken in the same globe as every sister since Eve. We have choked on the need to be chosen, fed on bright-dyed water ice, all syrup and shards.

We have believed we were born to be selected, elected to worth by a foreign power. We have sold our mountains for scratch-off tickets.

We have raced to the end of our novels, dry-mouthed and gasping for last-page reassurance that, yes, she will be loved. 

We have thought we were past this, that our mothers and grandmothers raised us strong and dignified. We have written poetry and space operas, unorthodox encyclicals and escape manuals. We have toasted each other’s confidence and roasted the rodents who were vulgar or vile.

Still, our whole lives have bled and led to the one.

Not even the largest shoulders on the loveliest little sweet-faced man can bear that all the way up the mountain.

I do, I do, I tell you I do believe in love. I look at the photograph of my grandparents on my desk, all matching Christmas sweaters and whole-soul hug, and I thank the God of every covenant. I ask them to pray for me before I write.

I ask them to pray for me before I hand over the pen.

I got my last page, once: the bouquet and the sigh of relief. It came at the cost of redacting my spots, a scowling Sharpie blacking out my best sentences. The End. I had joined the sisterhood of the chosen, the fellowship of the reassured, the world of wives, the hearth of the worthy. 

Everything led here. 

Only when everything fell apart did I take the book off the shelf, dust off the snow, and realize there were hundreds of pages left.

“Chosen” was a chapter, a bloated exercise, belching desperate exclamation points.
This was not the sum of my years. This was not the goal, the reward, the safe deposit box for all my love.

There was nothing safe about my sweet, wild love.

The narrow beam of the years burst into broad moonlight on the mountain, and every snowdrop glowed. 

We were right about love: it is the reason God painted our spots, the final stanza, the end game.

We were wrong about love: the game doesn’t end, and no man holds the dice. 

I am all new at love: jealous for my space, spacious at last, able to see all the love as the goal. 
There is room on my mountain for parents and friends, sisters and bosses, kindred Twitter spirits and Wawa cashiers, ancient authors and lively cats, innocent time-bending crushes and grandparents who whole-soul-hug me across the veil.

I don’t know if there will ever be room for a little man who’s large enough to know his role is modest.

I don’t know if I want anyone evaluating my pajamas or my plotline. 

I don’t know if I can share my spinach or my glimpses of the sacred.

I don’t know if my laser beam can contract.

I don’t trust myself to hang onto my hard-won worth in The Lover if I go back down the mountain.

I may be sola mia forever. I may want that. I realize this is a scandal against type.

But my sweet, wild love will not return void. I am living the goal. I am lush on the mountain. I am flush with purpose, too moonstruck to be typecast, too speckled to worry if anyone spots me.

Everything leads here. I am my type. I believe in big love. The Lover believes in me.