Lola
Being original is going against expectations. I was working at changing everything about me. You know how people react to things. The obvious answers to situations were what you didn’t want. So you worked at the opposite. You don’t want to be a type, but being the person that goes against the grain just becomes another type.
Ultimately, what was I going to make of myself in this memoir piece that came from source materials so old, I had long lost any strain of visceral connection with it? I was trying to pick her up, but she was a mother, and I wasn’t sure if I was interested in going in that direction. None of this was made up, and even so, this was not really my story. What I mean by this is that it was something that happened thanks to the mother, me, and the baby, along with a bunch of other people that were falling in and out of our conversations. These other people would be called minor characters in a work of non-memoir, but that was a reductive way of looking at the affects each one created for us. So, in a sense, I was not the author because there were too many things to it that did not have their origin in me. Truly, I had no interest in playing with her kid, but it was that thing that we are expected to do when an infant is present. That means that I didn’t even have the power of volition in this, which makes me less of a source.
If I were writing this script, I’d make the mother upset. He’s horsing around too much, and the playing with her kid is getting prolonged. That would make the story more interesting. In the real event, everybody was being polite, the mother looking on with a stiff smile, probably waiting for it to be over already. She never struck me as the patient type. Actually, I never got to know her because relations were cut off soon after this. There is no chance we could ever meet again today. But still, I have to play it safe and come up with a name for her that feels like her real name, but it has to be a name that is different enough so that she wouldn’t’ recognize it in the event she stumbled on my writing, happened to remember my name, and then recognized herself in this little anecdote that was growing to be more and more meaningless. If I were coming up for a name for her, it was going to be Adeline. Her name was actually striking, and in the time we went on those couple of dates, it really meant something. It was after it was over that it meant everything that was bad. And honestly, I am going to have to embellish those ugly parts with some better details. So for this recounting, I name her Adeline because that is a name that doesn’t mean anything to me yet, and so it can grow with what it could mean in this retelling.