Liar
I’m a liar.
Just so we make that clear.
I need to eat some more food so that I get on the right bent. A belly full of peanuts and Diet Dr. Pepper doesn’t constitute positive nutrition. And consequently, I get snippy. But, I also get a bit truthful, which is one of the things I wanted to do this blog for. Just flat-out, balls to the wall, NO FOOLING. But it’s very difficult for a pathological liar to evince truth even if she knows exactly what it is. I like to think I’m still at the stage when I can point out my own truth if only to myself and if only to decide what the best costume for that truth is.
I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’m nervouser and nervouser. I am drawing the devil of loving someone nearer and nearer and I’m trying to do things to get it to happen and stay. And there is a whole vast internal landscape of shrieking goddesses and bludgeoned carcasses and rivers of blood that come into view when I think about making this nest available to anyone else. They laugh because this effort is not unknown, not a brave new start. It is an old dance, a biannual shuffle, a strain really that I perform to no applause and to no effect.
But what the old crones and the battlestars don’t know is that the reason there’s been no entreaty inward is because for all the masquerade, I haven’t been ready. I haven’t known how to get ready to accomodate, modulate myself for another person. A self I feel extreme shame over. There have been no invitations accepted because none have been proffered. The doors have been so barred that I can feel my heart gag for air against my clutching rib cage. Safety. Safety. The future is unknown and if the future shone its full light upon you, everything would be seen. All the pretense and the goddesses and the moonlit paths and labyrinths and bloodied gothic surrounds would be put to dust. There would be coffee, opinions, and expectations. I would not do well in the world where lies are not art. I do not do well when I try to walk in that world. I would be on the ultimate high wire. Faking to exist, to stay upright, pretending I know this path like everyone else knows this path…as sheer instinct.
So I have my agonizingly messy life. A universe of flotsam and jetsam strewn about, each bottle and unfolded shirt saying go away, the owner is not ready to entertain. Miss Otis Regrets. This is home. Being here is watching the undergrowth become overgrowth, watching myself collapse inward. Not writing because I might say something that makes my head uncomfortable, something less than the palatial monument to great writing would enshrine in the completely fictional confines of my gnawing, entropic mind. Not reading because I might read something that makes me realize that the dream of writing is not achievable by someone with such rusty, disturbed and anachronistic skills such as I have. Not doing any thing with the time I have carved out because that becomes a commitment to a personality, a place, a hope, and therefore, a threat to this life. Such as it is.
There’s this whole cancerous mass of self and I worship it. I worship it so hard that I scar people’s faces, I warp their words, I make lepers out of everyone who might venture a hello. They are the ones in the colony. Being in here is the only place to be safe.
It isn’t about being unwanted. It isn’t about being ugly, unsettling, unfit. It isn’t about being incapable of committing, of choosing, of finding anything outside of this poisoned Eden worthy of crossing into its miasmic, shardsand environs. It’s about a girl who once saw a pretty thing, walled herself in with it and when she heard footsteps, swallowed the key. Now it’s just her and the thing and whether or not she loves it anymore, whether or not there’s any other thing better or brighter or more deserving on the other side of that wall, this is what she has. And she can either worship it and call her misery worship, too. Or she has to stop telling lies and start asking for help. And nobody has any mercy for liars, not really.
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Dillweed
I think it’s a little clear to me.
Oh, there’s nothing like reality for making time change speeds. For making a body suddenly cold on the warmest day of the season, for making a body burn like it runs on napalm beneath the ministrations and oscillations of the most reliable of fans.
I don’t feel much like talking again. But I have this time and I don’t want to waste it. I waste so much. I should be scrubbing the bathtub. Work. I believe in work. I should be throwing things away instead of screaming my stupid head off at my keyboard skipping every other damn word.
A stupid head. That’s what I have.
I thought I was doing pretty good about laying shit out here, even shit that I was fairly uncomfortable about. Notwithstanding the fact that saying anything about myself that is true is rather discomfiting to me, I was trying. But today, the old embarrassment squick rises up again. I want to come off so much better than this.
And my sitting there numbly while our lovely nice guy was lovely and funny and shirtless and flirting with everyone in sight including the girl he’s apparently dating, the cute girl in costume handing out pamphlets, the 72 year old volunteer woman, the middle aged party moms and needless to say, said nary a word to me doesn’t make me look like much more than chopped liver. I was very, very numb as a result. I didn’t eat, or talk much, just put my head in my book and I know what you’re saying because I was hearing it in my head about friendship and being whatever and not giving a shit about things and just being with people like the palm reader advised, but I just couldn’t.
I was really incapable of not minding. But, I did was any sangfroid type of girl does in these situations. I introduced myself to this new girl. The new cute girl who was invited to ride the tractor specifically because she was a cute girl – a situation which perhaps invites more questions than I care to answer – something which no one has ever requested I do. I smiled and turned around and shook her hand. All the while feeling like a complete imbecile with these tumultuous emotions of being irritated by his exact unrightness for me and his randomly asinine behavior being thrown in my face right after the gut punch of suddenly wanting him wildly and followed by the brick wall of it was never going to happen anyway.
It becomes insanely petty and silly when you write it down, though….it doesn’t become petty or silly enough for me to let it go. Not yet.
I felt like a heel. Like Cinderella, pre-fairy godmother, invisible and meant to work. Meant for work. Completely de-sexualized with my got up an hour early face and my little summer outfit and my fake lashes and my positive attitude. Like nobody would even look at me like that, I felt like a fucking eunuch. Except of course, for Mr. Creepy and his compliments. I would really rather not be spoken to at all if I was given the choice.
The Great Plan really didn’t go so great today. I came home and judiciously ate a few bad things and then tried to plot a better course, something more helpful than redirecting my bruised ego into something physically negative. I want to go to this fancy-dress party in September and make people faint clean away, I want to get to wear what I like and feel like I’m not…nothing. I want to float in Cinderella, post extreme makeover, post all the calluses pumiced away, post the drudgery that kills one soul. It’s a lot to fucking ask, I know, but it’s a goal. It’s supposed to be lofty. I want to be slender and still and glowing. I want to be unforgettable.
Because maybe then I’ll be able to forget today.
Punch to the Voicebox
That’s an anemic sounding car horn.
Sometimes I like the songs they play on the radio.
Irritation and frustration, saddlebags to the stars.
Things about today.
I don’t know why I was so damn chatty yesterday and now I totally cannot be arse to string together a sentence. There’s not been any movement on any front. Except maybe one, but I don’t want to jinx that by being too mouthy on the topic because mouthiness is one excuse for the obliteration of an ideal. Which sounds sort of existential, but comes down to me just wanting not to feel like a failure yet again. If I can avoid that, believe me, I will.
Things I want to do once I find a person good enough – qualified – not deranged – not unmoved to do these things with. (It is hilarious how I have to convince myself that no one I know will ever read this, because seriously, no one I don’t know is reading it, either):
Go to the zoo. Not for a day, not for every animal. We don’t need to go into the giraffe house and I have no interest in anything avian. I just want to go, see the gazelles, that crooked sign that explains the difference between dromedary and bactrian camels. People watch. Just until I start to feel bad for the animals a little bit.
….
I thought this would be a long list. That I might use it as a springboard to start to say something meaningful about my outlook on love. But I don’t have an outlook or a perspective or a toehold. I’m completely on the outside of the whole phenomenon. I try, but I find that I go backwards, what attracts me I repulse, what I repulse wants me. Ah, sweet science. I try and make a plan aside from pulling up my hemlines and sticking my leg out on street corners. But there isn’t anything particular I’m longing for. A person for outdoors, for sharing the breeze and those stunning sunsets, walking about. A person for indoors, talking about everything that’s outdoors. I don’t have big ideas. Or any ideas really.
Meanwhile, my sister may be planning her wedding, another finalizing her divorce and the other one is passing out (from donating blood.)
There’s weird conflict between us. But right now things are actually okay, something I couldn’t say a couple years ago. But it puts things in a very real relief – I’m always in waiting and yet, I have no idea what to stick my neck out for. What’s worth going through all of this for…no big plans, no real daydreams of a joined life. Just the sense that I really fucking need one for reasons beyond wanting to tell someone that the sound of the wind chimes and the air blowing tonight is amazing…even if it’s not doing a damn thing to cool me down.
I want someone for inside and outside. For sudden heat lightning in the courtyard. For the story of the walk with more than eight brown rabbits – my good luck charm (they’ve each got four feet a’piece, how can they not be lucky?) For a backrub. For a consistent murmur that I can spell, I do have a good heart, and in me there is an invincible season that is beautiful…to some folks. There’s a reason to carry on.
