Best Left Unfinished

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  It was the Christmas that she was twelve when she started to keep her list. Katherine called it a list anyway. It was, she supposed, actually a list in the sense that it was a series of events and things that she had noticed, but it was also more than that. It was also a writing project of sorts. It was a collection of her recollections, observations, and what she had thought at the time (even the thoughts that she had immediately shaken off after having them because they were too crazy to be entertained). It was an attempt to sort out her thoughts and organize them in an attempt to figure out what it was that she was thinking because she wasn’t always sure herself that she knew what it was that she was thinking.

  It was hard for her because words were not her natural medium for making sense of things. She had her photography for that, but it was failing her in this instance. She couldn’t capture what she needed to capture in her pictures in this area and that, more than anything else, was what was sort of slowly driving her crazy about it all. She wasn’t used to dealing with much of anything without her camera as a focal point, and she just wasn’t good at it. She needed some way to keep track of and try to make sense of everything, and the list was the only solution that seemed practical to her.

  She hadn’t really thought that she would keep up with it for too long, but she had. It had grown, seemingly of its own accord, and she found herself climbing a chair to reach the box on the back of the top shelf in her closet more and more often. Once she started keeping track, it was as though more and more things jumped out at her demanding to be included. She had a list and a place to keep her thoughts about the things that made the list, but she didn’t find herself making much in the way of headway in figuring out what all of it meant.

  Caleb Twist was just off in ways that she couldn’t begin to try to communicate to anyone else, and she would never try to do so. Caleb was Caleb. If he had secrets, then they were secrets for a reason. The list wasn’t for anyone else. The list would never be for anyone else. The list only existed because she was desperate for some sort of point-out-able to herself evidence that she wasn’t hallucinating things. Yes, she really had seen that. Yes, he really had done that. Yes, it wasn’t the first time. Yes, there were patterns. She wasn’t imagining. She wasn’t wrong. It would, of course, be much easier if Caleb just confided whatever it was to her, but she wasn’t inclined to push him about it. That wasn’t the way that their friendship worked.

  She had been eleven when she realized how truly isolated Caleb’s family seemed to be. She had decided on that word not because she really thought that it was the best word to describe the situation but because she couldn’t come up with any other that worked for her. She didn’t think that anybody else in the community noticed. Her dad didn’t even notice, but that was hardly the best example. Her dad was isolated himself and therefore unlikely to notice the same condition in others.

  The Twists and her father were all friendly people. They smiled and nodded and said things like “here, let me get that door for you” and would generally be described in nice (or even glowing) terms by their neighbors and acquaintances. It was a sort of a skill (Katherine had decided over the years that she had observed the behavior in her dad) that kept people at a distance without people realizing that they were being kept at a distance.

  Sometimes, Katherine thought that she only recognized it in them because she was in a position to see the difference. Her father, obviously, wasn’t the same way with her that he was with the rest of the world. As for the Twists, she was some sort of an exception for them as well. It took some time for her to recognize the detachment that their whole family practiced because she, quite frankly, hadn’t been paying attention. She was new, and she was grateful for the way that Caleb had sort of shepherded her through the navigation of both local landmarks and starting a new school. She was too caught up in the wonder of how easy it had been to make friends with Caleb when she had expected a bit of a loner first year. She was distracted by how nice it was to have someone who seemed to choose to hang out with her over other options. She was enamored with the way she had stumbled into her first outside of family nickname. Caleb had spotted the K. D. Vance label she used for her school supplies (a requirement from her previous school that had become habit) and christened her Kady.

  She had always been Katherine (something her mother had insisted on) to everyone but her father (who had ignored her mother’s ire for years and continued to call her KitKat). She was still Katherine to everyone in her new school, but she was Kady to Caleb. There was something warm and fuzzy about that. There was something belongingish about it that she hadn’t even realized that she had been wanting until she had it. Being friends with Caleb was different than being friends with the kids she had completed projects with and gone to birthday parties for at her old school. They had gotten along. They had had fun, but she always had the strangest sense that Caleb was choosing her (not because she was around and nice enough) because there was something in her that he recognized and valued.

  Katherine had decided somewhere along the way that the Twists as a whole (and Caleb in particular) were some sort of a puzzle that she couldn’t see the whole of as she tried to fit various pieces into a frame of which she wasn’t sure of the shape. She turned and slid and tried to click each piece with all of the other pieces that she had noticed and picked up along the way (and more often than not she couldn’t seem to make them go together in any way that made sense to her). Even when there were things that felt like they did fit together, it usually didn’t feel as though that puzzle was any closer to becoming something that she could recognize.

  In response, she did the only thing that she could think to do. She made her way to the notebook (that would eventually become notebooks) that was always waiting for her hidden at the back of that top closet shelf. She pulled it down and recorded things in the concrete structure of ink. She took the strands that escaped her grasp when they were only thought of words representing ideas she wasn’t certain of and turned them into the closest she could come to the visual representation that she understood best.

  She worked on her list. She recorded her puzzle pieces and wrote down what combinations of linking them together she had pondered over and tried. She noted which ways seemed to work and which ways seemed to have no chance of fitting together. She gave herself permission to think of anything and everything. She gave herself permission to not have to make sense. The list was a place for ideas whether they were practical or outlandish. It was a place to wonder, ponder, and try to understand. The list went on for years with additions, corrections, and reevaluations. She never breathed a word of it to anyone -- not even to Caleb. It wasn’t really about Caleb so much as it was about her wanting to understand.