I would be remiss if I didn’t start this post off
with a story about Yourself.
No, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about Yourself, a girl I happened
to meet when I was in kindergarten. At
the time, she was (presumably) a year older than me, but other than that she
seemed normal. Brown hair, brown eyes,
freckles -- not exactly someone who’d stand out in a crowd. But the thing about Yourself was that she had
a certain verbal tic: as far as I could tell, she would end every sentence with the word “yourself”. Say hello to her, and she’d say “Hello
yourself.” Moo like a cow and she’d go
“Moo yourself.” At one point I was
walking through the school halls and spotted some art from her class; sure
enough, I spotted a piece with Yourself’s name in the corner, written in the
black ink of a Sharpie. Permanently
etched into green construction paper.
Since my family packed up and moved to a different
town (and, you know, because I was six), I never got around to learning the
full story behind Yourself. Maybe she
was just being cute and sassy, and tagging all of her sentences with that
single word. Maybe there was
legitimately something wrong with her.
Maybe her parents had terrible naming sense, and spamming that word was
to be their penance. No matter the
origin, I wonder about the end result: what’s life like for her now if she
hasn’t dropped the tic? Is it a waking
nightmare, or proof that she lives by her own rules? The mind boggles.
I just thought I’d tell that story because it’s so
bizarre it’s actually kind of entertaining -- unlike getting tangled up in Tokyo Mirage Sessions “censorship”
again. So let’s do this lickety-split.
