Me and My Little Cousins

A side effect of my recent month of desperately not wanting to be alive anymore was that I grew closer to some extended family members I rarely talked to. I was surprised to learn how highly my uncle thinks of me. I knew he liked me just fine, but we hadn't talked at all since he stopped using Facebook, and when he was on Facebook, we often disagreed about politics. Some of his kids used to love playing with me, but they outgrew me around the same time they all got iPads. His youngest kids weren't old enough to have personalities the last time I saw them. Anyway, I just had a delightful week at their house. They're such a beautiful, loving family, and it was the first time in fourteen years that I went a whole week without feeling lonely. The youngest ones, now five and three, wanted to be around me all the time. They exhausted me, but I loved them dearly. It broke my heart to leave them, and even more to realize that someday they'll outgrow me too.

I had to hold the three-year-old to make him smile because he was crying about my imminent departure. The five-year-old refused to smile. The face she made represented her personality pretty well, though.

I want to share some cute quotes. The five-year-old stumbled upon a deck of Book-of-Mormon-themed Go Fish cards and said, "Where's the wicked Laban?" And then I swear to God she said, "The Lord told Nephi to kill the wicked Laban. But the Lord doesn't actually tell people to kill. That's weird." I was amazed. I don't think I had that level of insight at her age. I just hated church because it was boring.

The three-year-old, in contrast, raised his plastic sword and said, "KILL THE WICKED LABAN! YEAH!"

The morning of the day I left, I was playing with the three-year-old while the five-year-old, to my surprise and disappointment, played with her iPad for at least an hour. I gently inquired whether she intended to do that all day. I was like, "It's just that I'm going to leave today, and I don't want you to be sad and think 'Oh no, I wish I had played with Christopher while he was here...'"

Rather curtly, she said, "But I didn't choose that. What I choosed is the iPad."

And I was like

The three-year-old would never have chosen an iPad over me. The three-year-old worshiped me. The three-year-old said "Hey, watch this!" and did something dumb every time I went two seconds without paying attention to him. But eventually, the five-year-old joined us and explained that she choosed me too. She choosed both. And no, I'm not making fun of her for regularizing irregular verbs, I just think it's cute.

​When we had some rare alone time a little later, she said, "You'll miss me so much, you'll forget about your family." Then she wondered about my family's whereabouts, and then she thought it was sad that I didn't live with them anymore.

I explained that it's normal to leave your family when you grow up. I told her that when she grows up, she might go to college, she might get married, she might get her own house. I immediately felt guilty for lying to her about the house.

She said, "But where's your true love? I know you don't have a true love, but when are you gonna marry one?"

I didn't know how to explain to a five-year-old that I have the sex appeal of a road accident.

While I was there, I watched E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the first time in twenty-three years. Because I'd read the novelization probably two and a half times before 2010, I forgot what was from where, and the movie, despite being almost universally recognized as one of the greatest of all time, felt incomplete to me. The novelization includes many more scenes and explains so much more. It shares a lot of E.T.'s perspective, Elliott's mom's perspective, and even Michael's friends' perspectives. So in the movie, a lot of things felt underdeveloped and unfinished. I still enjoyed it, but now I really want to read the novelization again.

Also, I was in the car with my uncle when it started raining hard, and that reminded him of a massive rainstorm he experienced during his LDS mission to Venezuela, and that led him to talk about how politicians have screwed over the people of Venezuela, and that led him to explain his political philosophy for a long while. He's libertarian. He's not one of the godawful conservatives who's actively trying to build a Christian theocracy and make life worse for everyone who's not a billionaire. He recognizes that Donald Trump is a godawful human being and not the second coming of Jesus. He just believes in freedom. I believe in freedom too. I just disagree about the extent to which certain obligations we have as members of a society should trump our freedom - taking public health precautions during a pandemic, to name a totally random example. He said there are many people on both sides of the political aisle that he'd like to see die long, painful deaths and/or burn in hell for a long time, and I certainly found common ground with him on that point. It was heartwarming.

In conclusion, I want to become the kind of person that my little cousins think I am.