Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

If you have a complicated relationship with someone, an unexpected but pernicious reminder of this fact can be had, of all places, in the greeting card aisle. Here is a place where relationships are neatly divided and categorized, and none so much as in the birthday cards. There are cards for mothers and fathers, brother and sisters, and every other member of the family. There are cards for husbands and wives, and cards filed “Birthday with Romance” for that specific sentiment, when such heavy handed gems as, “It’s your birthday and I’m thinking of you... Naked”. There are “Birthday for Him” and “Birthday for Her”, some meant to be given to close friends and some meant to hand to someone in the office after the whole floor has signed it.

There is a card for everyone in your life that has a defined role, which often people do. People who you have fuzzy relationships with are either still on their way to being important enough to get a card, or on their way out of your life. In Greeting Card Land, someone is your friend, or they’re not. Someone is your boyfriend or fiance or husband, or they’re not. There is no birthday card for the man who you met when a new friend started dating him, the man who then drew you into a bizarre triangle where you provided all the abstract elements of a girlfriend—the long nights talking, the emotional support, the understanding—and the actual girlfriend bought the sex. There isn’t a card for this man who you threw yourself at while he was still dating your friend, and then again and again after they broke up, getting rejected each time. No card for someone who initiates deep kisses when they’re drunk, knowing full well your deep, abiding feelings, and then when you bring it up a day later abruptly changes the subject. There isn’t a card for the man who, despite rejecting you, expresses romantic feelings and actions to you constantly in the space of well over a year, orchestrating candle lit dinners, posing as your boyfriend at weddings, asking you to dance in bars and in his kitchen, insisting you stay over and sleep next to him, rubbing your shoulders when you don’t feel well. And there is not a good card for someone who, after being out of touch for months, starts a letter with “Jenna Baby,” and in the next sentence refers to you as his “dear old pal”.

So there I am, in the greeting card aisle, dog food, shampoo and toothpaste in my cart, doing what I expected to be a simple task: pick up a card for this man who is celebrating a birthday this week. Although it has been a rocky road for him and me, I didn't think this would be difficult. I generally believe that greeting cards are mostly a waste of trees. I am known to chuckle at humorous ones, but as sentimentality goes, pre-printed messages chosen from a wall of brightly colored paper don’t tend to make a significant dent in my heart. Greeting cards work most nicely as either a container for money, and/or a poor but often necessary substitute for one’s own presence, and in the latter case, it is not at all the pre-printed missive, but the handwritten message that accompanies it that has the most meaning to me.

Given all this lack of tender feelings, it is strange that I quickly became obsessed with finding the perfect card, although I should have predicted it. I spent nearly an hour reading card after birthday card, trying to find the ideal tone. I couldn’t be too romantic, because that could easily result in rejection.

Again.

I couldn’t pick up anything that said “friend” on it either, because I didn’t want him to think that I feel he’s just a friend. I toyed with attempting to revive our long standing inside joke about our eventual and inevitable wedding and marriage with a “Husband” card, but was worried that—though we’ve been writing—we’ve been apart long enough that it would go over his head. And I definitely couldn’t get him one of the many cards telling him to celebrate with a round of martinis or shots of tequila, because he’s currently in jail, serving time for a DUI, among other things.

I can’t call him, I can’t see him, and this card, this mass marketed, colorful paper with a hollow pre-printed message, has to wholly substitute for me being with him on his birthday. Suddenly this card seems Important. It has to say, I’m here for you, even though we didn’t talk for months up until a number of weeks ago; that I’m your friend, but we’ll never be just friends; that I think about you all the time, but not in a creepy obsessive way. Maybe the card could even say I feel guilty about you being arrested during the brief period in which we drifted apart, as if I could have possibly prevented it, as if seeing me a couple times a week equaled making better decisions, like a cheap therapist.

So I end up in the greeting card aisle for an hour, at the end of a totally normal shopping trip on a totally normal day, having this overwhelming emotional crisis, feeling ridiculous, and pretty much unable to get it together.

I pick up one card that looks like something I might design myself if I had the time and inclination. No nutty cartoons, no jokes, small and lovely. A die cut, quite decorative Happy Birthday message in one color showing through to another solid color. And I open the card and read the message, and it is spot on. Not as complex as my actual feelings, but a lovely sentiment, warm and loving, but not too romantic, and not too friendly. Just what I’d like to express. I’m holding this card, staring at the message, and I can’t move. I can’t buy this card, this perfect card. I physically cannot do it; I’m frozen in place.

I finally look at the front of the perfect card again, see three small—nay, tiny—rhinestones dotting the front, and decide that this decoration makes it not jail mail kosher, which is completely insane; it would more than likely raise no red flags whatsoever. I then put it back and walk over to the small rack of $1 cards, full of completely flat messages with pretty but utterly meaningless and flavorless art, and pick two pleasant looking ones, resolving that I’ll decide which brand of bland I’d like to be when I get home.