It was a prettier egg

One distant Easter, I decorated an egg, as one does. I didn't go out of my way to make it memorable. Egg decorating has never ranked in my top ten favorite parts of the holiday. I used only basic craft supplies: pom-poms, stickers, and googly eyes. Once I had finished my inexpert ministrations, I looked at my creation with dread. It was cute. It was, more specifically, too cute to end up peeled and in the garbage.

I had no lack of stuffed animals. My childhood artistic skills were middling, and that is generous. I was not so starved for playthings or so talented at designing that my imprinting on an egg made much sense. I had not fashioned Pygmalion out of something from a styrofoam carton. It was just an egg with stickers and cardboard, but my brain decided I loved it.

I was not entirely irrational. There was no way a hardboiled egg could last the week, to say nothing of the ages. I recall thinking I ought to transplant the decorative elements to something else -- maybe a plastic egg that would never decay -- but wouldn't that be akin to murdering a loved one and draping a dummy in their skin? It was not emotionally feasible. I had summoned a soul into this egg, and I could do nothing with it but love it.

As mentioned, I had copious stuffed animals. Too many, to be frank, most of which now hang in garbage bags in my parents' basement. I cannot say I completely broke myself of my interest in them until I properly found girls. It may not benefit me to delve too deeply into the psychology of that, but let us assume I was not projecting the same emotion from a sack of polyfill to a budding classmate. (I still have my first stuffed animal, a brown lump of a rabbit, resting on some shelves, flanked on either side by an air quality monitor and a wooden box of fountain pen supplies. Other stuffed toys in my apartment do not stay in the bedroom; their accumulating dust irritated the air monitor.)

The egg, needing affection, fell into the same mental category as a stuffed animal and demanded to be treated as such. It was perishable -- I was a bizarre, not stupid, child -- so existing outside the refrigerator was unwise. I could not save it, so it was like hospice.

I decided to wrap it in as much packing material as possible, then put it in a Ziploc (for protection and insulation). I built a cairn of my stuffed animals and interred it so I could sleep near it.

I don't know if I blessed it with a name or would have considered it an act of cruelty given its brief tenure in this world. It might have remained The Egg.

I slept poorly, not wanting to crack it, and was grumpy for Easter and unable to articulate why.

It spent the day in the refrigerator with those of its unspecial peers that did not end up as breakfast.

It cracked the following night, and, with mourning and defeat, I threw it out, cursing myself that I couldn't keep The Egg safe.

There was no sense in keeping a cracked egg. However, an intact shell wouldn't have made much of a difference in another day outside a refrigerator. It was already a health hazard.

Let me be magnanimous -- something I may not deserve -- and say this happened thirty-five years ago. It may have been closer to thirty-two than I would like to admit, but I cannot say for sure now.

In the best of circumstances, children are foreigners in the adult world. As such, my brief fixation on an egg I had designed is not so inexplicable. I recall hating that I had created this adorable thing, wishing I had just left it an undifferentiated mass of splotches -- let me underscore that I was not artistic in this way -- so I wouldn't have to care about it.

There was no best-case scenario here beyond letting the egg meet its fate as a protein-rich snack into which I had not projected a nascent narrative. If I could find such value in the design, I have no question that I could have reconstructed it if I had wanted to -- though that would not have been The Egg but its descendent.

It is worth not psychoanalyzing a sentimental child, pathologizing this quirky anecdote. Yet, it is not a singular bout of emotional deviance but a smoky bead on a long chain.

I can draw a line from The Egg to weeping in our shed because I had met a fellow middle school gifted kid at a Center for Talented Youth gathering. This girl, Skye Green (whose evocative name I have never forgotten because how could I?), had liked me there. Inasmuch as children that age can, Skye and I flirted. It was the first time I understood that someone could like me that way. I knew I would never see her again. I could not express the brutal unfairness that beset me, so I opted to rage beside the lawn mower. We exchanged a few perfumed letters -- she lived in New Jersey, which might as well have been the Isle of Skye -- and then we did not. It was no balm to me that there was someone like me out there. Skye would not give me the opportunity of a first girlfriend, so the world was barbaric.

Reviewing entries I wrote two decades ago, I find echoes of a child forsaking sleep so that he might not crack a doomed egg. I clung to things -- mostly people -- I found pretty, whether or not it made sense. Often, it did not, and I knew it with an amplification of that ovoid dread. The sensible thing would have been to eat the eggs, as it were, letting them fulfill their actual purposes rather than choking them in bubble wrap and taking them to bed. It was not joy when I found another, but the apprehension of an impulse I could not control, the same as biting my nails bloody. I did not want to do these things, but I did not know what it was to stop.

I gained a reputation for serial monogamy in high school, which was more deserved than not. I do not know an appropriate average for girlfriends and fondling from fourteen to seventeen. I assume I exceeded it, all while maintaining the purity of my intentions. I was being the best boyfriend I could -- the definition of which surely did not match what I was doing -- and fluttering away when reality did not match my image. If we were more physical than I intended, it was with the best of intentions. I wasn't trying to steal third base, only beginning to fall in love with someone I had known for a few weeks. Breaking hearts after removing bras was hardly my fault if I even claimed that I did it for love. (Of my dalliances, I ended eleven, they ended eight, and we can call the rest draws. In my slight defense, those I ended skewed early in my dating history, and those the women ended tended toward more severe. A few of those they ended would have done me good to have definitively ended long before.)

We can absolve the child, sleepless beside a Ziploc stuffed with cotton balls. However, we can be forgiven for looking askance at the young man who had the resources available to know he was hurting himself, who mistook existential malaise for depth. We can shake our heads hard at the teenager with his hand where it didn't belong, insisting that their hearts and his romantic ego could be found in the panties of a girl whose middle name he did not know.

last watched: God's Favorite Idiot
reading: The Empty Ones