Storytime

When you write about everything at once, the details get lost.

There's the story you meant to tell about moving in, the one that filled you with such gratitude for C and J and the mothers who helped them clean before they left. See, you wanted to put your sweaters on a shelf in your closet, and you figured you should dust it off before setting out all your clean clothes, so you sprayed lemon Pledge on the shelf and stood on your tiptoes to wipe it down with a clean paper towel, and when you finished you glanced at its white surface and saw only a damp handprint without so much as a speck of dust.

There's the story you made sure to remember word-for-word, the one that showcases the most imaginative six-year-olds you've ever seen. There are three of them, rambunctious boys who are terribly sweet and sweetly terrible by turns, and one day you overheard their game of pretend:

"I'm a haunted armadillo."

"I'm half-scorpion and half-skeleton."

"I'm a... I'm a knight... and I'm an elf [motions to ears]... no, I'm not an elf, but I have a sword."

You hid your smile fairly successfully until the end of the day, when the first young lad turned to you: "Don't forget, I have cannons that come out of my shell."

Of course. How could you forget? "How many?" you ask, oh so serious.

"Two, or one. Depending on what I want." Naturally.

And then there's the story you don't really know how to share, the one that leaves you with blurry vision and foggy mind. It's the story that makes you think about heartache and how it's not so much an ache as a tightening, as though the raw pain touching those you love puts its hand around your heart and squeezes a little, and it's not a story you enjoy telling, but it's one you think your friends should hear, so you go ahead and put it out there and hope.

It's time to get back to the details in their proper order; your regular Never Ruthless service resumes starting now.