Drawing by Elaine Brown Folgar
The writer was unsure if he should be excited. He had seen other writers on the app, who posted they were excited by similar pieces of news as that which he had received. But he did not feel excited or thrilled. In fact, he felt something approaching disappointment. Like at Christmas as a child, when the thing you've been desiring turns out to be something you didn't want at all. So, he didn't know if he should post that he was thrilled or excited about the news unless he truly was.
He also didn't know if other people who said they were excited or thrilled by similar news were actually excited or whether they felt a similar ambivalence and posted anyway, passing right through ambivalence or disappointment just as they hit post.
He looked out the window, tried to imagine the scene. Dogs were barking in the distance. Light was staining the desk in his room red. Cars passed by. He could hear them as waves on the pavement. These were the facts, which were helpful, because unlike the news, he could at least describe them.
Perhaps it was the limited aperture of words available to him—excited, thrilled, happy—causing the issue. He experimented by typing, "ambivalent to learn," but he knew it was wrong, knew other people who had been truly excited about similar news would read his note and feel he was ungrateful or unworthy. They would be hurt by his ambivalence.
Then again, it was entirely possible they would be thrilled to hear about his ambivalence, which would allow them to express that they had always been ambivalent as well, rarely thrilled or excited. That chance also existed, and he had to consider it. There was a plane overhead. He could hear it, but he couldn't see it.
Once, his son, who was four then, had described a plane's contrails as cutting like a knife through the sky. He didn't feel ambivalent about his son's finger pointing, nor his phrasing. He felt excited and thrilled his son was already displaying a facility with language. Although, he thought, maybe someday in the future his son would also be sitting at a desk feeling ambivalent about news related to language, and the language itself would be the trap his son found himself inside, as he himself did this winter afternoon. And he did not wish that on his son, the ambivalence, the fear of not knowing how his language would be perceived. It was easier for a child, held fast in his father's arms, to use his language, like a knife cutting through the ambivalence of adulthood.
Then again, the writer had not known his own father, so he couldn't be sure. He sometimes felt ambivalent about that as well, along with his divorce and the subsequent absences in his own son's life. And he was sad. But now he'd gotten astray again, and still the news lay inside of him, amorphous as the grey day, which couldn't make up its mind about whether it was going to snow.
He began anew, "thrilled to announce," certain this time around his words would be understood, that all the valences of happy, ambivalent, sad, depressed, misunderstood, confused, and sorrowful, would be caught in that single word, thrilled, which he typed out for the hundredth time, meaning so many things all at once.
