This Is Not a Confession

I used to love spending time underneath tables and desks. As a child, that is.

The more complicated the desk, with multiple shelves and drawers, the more interesting it was to find a nook, an unseen unthought-of barricaded little space that I could fit into, and spend time hidden away.

Just my own little space, un-take-away-able.

As an adult I am a lot more boring.

I don’t get under the conference room table unless it is to find a power slot. I don’t visit people’s bathrooms to secretly hypothesize on their hidden lives. I don’t giggle openly, at unfathomable reasons. At every reason.

I don’t quite feel the overwhelming need to scuttle away little bits of “treasure” for others to find — small pebbles, a pamphlet folded into a boat, a single knitting needle, the other part of the pair lost forever.

I don’t feel the urge to make things move just because they can, with just a single touch — the rocking horse, the wind chimes, the paper chandelier — until everything around is a moving, noisy mess like a windstorm through the living room.

I don’t feel the need to remove just that one piece of the jigsaw puzzle, that one Lego square, that one spoon out of an immaculate doll house set.

Just to make things a little bit asymmetric, a little bit imperfect, a little off kilter. A little more lifelike.

And I definitely don’t feel the need to collect all these items into one innocent-looking shoe box of odds and ends, a collection of things no one will need and no one will use. But a box of memories, nonetheless.

No I don’t do these things anymore.

So if you lose that little bit of something, don’t look at me.

This is not a confession.