Dinosaurs & Identity – Love & Interest

The boy tells me everyone finds me obnoxious

I’m hurt. This boy has never said a thing to me. I don’t recall ever saying or doing anything hurtful to him. I’m hurt. I don’t get it.

The boy tells me everyone finds me obnoxious because I won’t stop talking

I’m hurt. This boy who never speaks finds the angle that cuts deep. I’m still a girl but I already know that I am talkative. He’s not the first to point it out. I know he’s right. Why won’t I stop talking? I have no clue. I know I should. I know I want to. I know I can’t seem to be able to. I don’t know how I’ll get better. I’m hurt. I feel ashamed.

These words come from a boy who knows how not to speak in class. He knows better than me to keep it shut, and he knows it. I can hear it in the condescending tone that he uses. I can read it on his face. The boy is talking me down, and he likes it. The boy who never said a word to me took his opportunity to make me feel small and he succeeded. I’m hurt. I’m defeated.

The boy tells me everyone finds me obnoxious because I won’t stop talking about Greece

I’m hurt, but I’m not defeated anymore! Pretentious boy attacks me on my roots. The boy will receive my thunder. Who the hell does he think he is, to try to make me feel small about my interest in my long-lost heritage? Shame is boiling in my veins and turns into anger. I talk about something I don’t know, and he knows it.

My face is Greek. My name is Greek, and yet. I’ve never been to Greece. I don’t know a word in Greek. I can’t tell any tale from mythology. I don’t know any figure from Antiquity other than Athena, about whom I know nothing, like whether she belongs to mythology or Antiquity, or both. All I know is that I find both her name and helmet cool. I was just given a drachma and realized that Alexander’s name spelled like mine. I’m head over heels about it. For the first time in my life, I feel something that isn’t powerlessness and shame about my long-lost heritage. I feel proud that I am somehow Greek. But shitface decided he would piss on my parade. The boy who has no friends, and with whom nobody wants to play or speak, thought he would seize the opportunity to bring me down violently. The winds were finally blowing in my favor when it came to exploring my identity. The boy didn’t like it. My joy triggered something in him, so he took the angle that cuts deep and paired it with the hole in my story to say one sentence, and one sentence only, to the talkative girl.

“Oh really? Well, everyone hates you and your stupid dinosaurs.”

The talkative girl knows how to hit the nerdy boy with a kick of the knee right into the boy’s obsessive passion: his precious dinosaurs. The boy thought it was right to hurt her, so he got burned. The boy enjoyed bringing down the popular girl who plays soccer with the boys and has countless suitors who enjoy her spirit.

The boy was wrong, and so was I.

For decades since, I’ve thought about the boy and felt regrets getting back at him, even though I understand why the little girl I used to be reacted the way she did. I felt shame. I was hurt. That wasn’t the first time. I could have handled it better. But his snarky tone is what I couldn’t forgive. He wanted me to feel pain. He wasn’t the first boy or kid to have that desire. I played with boys and kissed a few. I fought also with more than two. Behind the bushes is where we’d go to fight. Until puberty kicked in and my interest in fights went out the window, as I saw boys getting stronger and girls fighting like cats, I enjoyed asserting dominance with my body over the naughty boys and girls in my class. But this nerdy boy wasn’t naughty. He never picked up a fight with me. I never threw salt on his wounds, so why on earth did he decide to assert dominance over me using the angle that cuts deep and the hole that feeds my void?

I only understood his why when I was able to go to Greece, several years later. The land is paradise. The food is delicious. The language is charming. The music is divine. That’s all fine and good, but there’s more. When I am in Greece, I pass. I could pretend I’m mute or too precious to respond, and I would pass as Greek. My skin glows when I am in Greece. I was born for Greece, or I was born with Greece inside of me, but I was not born with the nerdy boy’s ability to learn and recite gazillion words and facts.

He was the nerd of my class. He had great marks. Everyone felt small and annoyed at his ability to learn and recite gazillion words and facts. He had no friends, but he loved dinosaurs. He had them all over his stuff. He often stayed in class during recess, the nose in his books about dinosaurs. When he talked about them, it was always to display the extent of his knowledge, as in all the information he knew about dinosaurs. If another kid showed interest in dinosaurs, the boy would make the kid feel small by throwing his knowledge and taking pleasure in being right and on being the first or the only kid in the room able to prove that he knew a shit ton of stuff about dinosaurs. Unfortunately for the boy, that behaviour drew away from him even the folks who could have been interested in sharing his passion for dinosaurs, because the boy never shared the mic and always took over the matter.

The boy gave me a teaching. The boy was right.

I too, tend to hoard the mic when the conversation touches a subject I’m passionate about. The only difference between us lies in his phenomenal ability to remember and my abyssal incapacity to recall. In terms of curiosity, this boy and I are just the same. In terms of commitment and ability to turn our passions into a body of knowledge, this boy and I are equal.

Intellectually speaking, the only place where we are different is our memory.

His type of memory will lead him to dig deeper, and deeper into his passion, which can very well revolve around one subject, and one subject only, like “dinosaurs”, to the point of ignoring his surroundings, not making friends and never learning the art of making one, until he crashes and must stop (i.e. sleep or let love in).

My type of memory will lead me to explore all sorts of seemingly unrelated stuff that trigger my passion and jump from one ship to another, just cause I felt like it or saw something cute somewhere at some point and added to my bucket list that this thing would be worth testing and that another thing sounded like fun, making many friends along the way but keeping no friendships on the long run, after saying “so long, suckers!” to everyone who’s ever shared my passion for a while but to whom I’ve showed I could never stay put and will always end up sailing away, dumping my stories into the ears of the next person I meet and asks where I come from.

That was my fate, until I met the one true love able to listen to my stories, make sense of my whereabouts and see how the stuff that caught my attention was related, after all, since altogether they mapped out my heart, which my one true love cares about, all the while being able to gently tell me to shut up, because left unchecked I’m really making myself obnoxious to everyone around me, so I better learn to put down the mic and look at her instead.

She may have something smart to say, who knows?

I’m just staring at her and that’s enough for me to get completely lost in her. I try to focus and listen, and that’s when I realize she does have an extended body of knowledge that is worth tapping into, as in listen and wonder, and I understand that her encyclopedic mind seems to me more interesting to explore than all of my pirate stories combined, and she talks about what she knows with grace, not like the boy and his dinosaurs.

It still cuts deep to be told to drill it down a bit on a passion. Numerous times already I have felt like giving her back her sermons like I figuratively kicked the boy with my knee: right where it hurts. Bam! But I am not a girl anymore, and my one true love is a nerd, but she’s not a little boy either. We’ll find our way to each other, and I hope the nerdy boy is now a nerdy man who learned how to talk with women a tad bit better.

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Savato Kiriako, grateful for Love & Turkey