"Romantic"

The prior entry got me thinking on another topic. Before my first relationship (with Jay) I would always imagine all the things that I could do for my bf. I just wanted to do little unique things that a lot of people didn’t do, like leaving funny poems or weird little gifts for him. I also thought of how I would love little things like that, but I knew that it would most likely not happen. I probably wouldn’t wake up to find little presents or maps that would send me on some sort of hunt. So, I knew that I would have to do it for my bf. But as I had no boyfriend, I could only imagine. Movies like Amelie inspired me. While watching it, oh how I craved that someone would do something for me like Amelie did for her love. And then I got Jay, and my creative mind was free to wander and create. I’ve done little things like leave poems with a funny edge under his car windshield wipers and such. I’ve also left weird gifts and notes for him at the video drop off at his job. For Valentines Day, I tried to do something different. I got him something like 6 different presents and put them into 6 separate Tupperware containers and put locks on them. There’s a bit more to the story…but…yeah… For his birthday presents, I made Jay answer some sort of question that related to me…things that he should know by that point in that relationship. Heehee, a sort of test. In May-June, Jay and I didn’t see each other for 6 weeks because I went to Seattle for a week and when I got back he was in Cancun, and then I left for Europe for three weeks. I knew I had to do something BIG since we wouldn’t be seeing each other for so long. I bought a fish bowl and glued an assortment of colored tissue paper on the inside to make it colorful and such. I went through tons of magazines and found words and phrases and pictures that reminded me of Jay, me, or of both of us. I also went through my journals and took out little quotes and stuff of what I used to think of Jay and of what of him at that point. All of this stuff I glued onto colorful tag board and on the back I made some comment about it, and then placed them into the fishbowl. When Jay got back from Cancun, there was a cardboard box waiting for him at the Video Place – where he works – with the bowl inside, and also instructions. For the whole time that I was gone, he was to pick out a few things from there every day. I just thought it a way to have him think of me every day. And Jay enjoyed it, and that was the purpose. Before I came up to Minnesota, I made a scrapbook for Jay and I. It’s just about our beginnings to where we are now, and I put a bunch of pictures in there with little side notes and journal entries and the like. It took Jay almost an hour to go through the whole thing.

Now, I am not the only one who does these little things. In the beginning of Jay and I, he commented that he just wasn’t the kind of person to think of something creative like that. But then Jay found out that I held a certain liking for gnomes. I love garden gnomes and had always wanted one before, but I felt that if I were to have one, I couldn’t just have one bought for me at Wal-Mart, it’d have to be stolen from someone’s yard. Then the gnome will have a funny story to go with it. One night, Jay and I learned of a gnome in a State Center yard and he went to go get it for me. It was a really nice – and heavy – stone gnome. Heehee, I can still remember seeing Jay run back to the car, straining under the weight of that gnome. Oh, I love that gnome! When Jay went to Colorado for a week, he came back and made me do this little hunt around his house to find these little plastic gnomes that he stole for me from some woman’s yard. The little adventure was so great, for it was like a story where these gnomes ran away from these enemies and I had to go rescue them from trees. So great! Also, when I returned to Europe, Jay had written a funny poem for me in which I was called the “little whore from Wales.”

My friend Rachel made the comment to me one time after learning of one of my little surprises for Jay. “I love your little romantic doings, it’s unique.” Yeah, I write poems and leave gifts for Jay, and he steals gnomes for me. Fucking romantic.