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.
Mnemosyne
You don’t know me well enough to know if I’m doing this to be ironic or not.
You don’t know if I’m humming the old song we used to sing because I want to remember or because I can’t forget.
Oh, how maudlin we’ve become in our twenties.
There’s a few things I think are memorable about this gray, odd, awkward day. I’ve made a plan to make a new life plan. This plan is currently in only the outline stage, but it involves me shedding lame old habits and picking up fresh, tremendous, dynamic new ones. Like this dear haunt, for one, and the dressing I am sewing for its windows. Apparently, the plan involves purchasing a vibrator. And lots of water glasses being ticked off a very large chart. And it involves me cooking – which I seem to avoid like the plague of late and I don’t know why. Which is to say, I know exactly why, the kitchen’s a mess and I really can’t be arsed to clean it. Because I only have have the desire and ability to do one thing well and if I give it to an apple green kitchen, I can’t be giving it to you. So, really, aren’t you happy with my choice?
I don’t know why I’ve given up on the question mark. Another way I’ve failed the English grammar, I suppose.
The plan will go into effect whenever it will be most efficacious or whenever I feel the strongest longing for a greater happiness that outweighs my natural sloth and terror. Soon, I hope, probably when I feel my tether slip. I’ve already been clocked about the head about the need for the plan by people I both love and loathe, so we’ll have to see what becomes the trigger. I’m getting myself open to it. I’m counteracting the inertia. Clever!
I have no idea how I ever got to 500 words ever before. This is a sort of agony tonight, but I will soldier on. It’s cooler, anyway, and the rain has stayed the grievous heat that has made its way under my skin and would not give me peace. What else?
The man in hospice was sitting up today. It’s not disappointment, or even awe that he’s still alive that I feel, it’s more a sort of feeling that you know that someone’s playing hooky. It’s not your business, and you won’t tell, but you wonder if someone’s waiting on him, tapping their feet. But I don’t think he’s the one keeping him there. I think he’s got every limb tied to someone who loves him and can’t manage without him, even though they have to. Even though one of his best friends told us about the plans for the service, the cremation. Even though he was sitting up today. So they increase the morphine, he turns yellow and corpse-like, and we talk about what we’re doing for the fourth of July and how much we’re looking forward to the fireworks.
Also, as a post-script, I may have flashed a woman today by accident. Sorry, it’s a horrible shirt!
Enchantee
There’s a boy. It always starts with a boy, doesn’t it?
Makes me feel like I’ve spent my life holding my breath.
Everyone’s having babies and married. Everyone’s happy. Makes me feel like I’ve come to school naked. Forgot to take a class for a whole semester. Like I’m still using school analogies when I graduated over three years ago. Like I’m a fool.
I’m running around trying to pretend that there’s no reason to make eyes at a boy. That I don’t even want to. And I don’t even want to. He’s not even anything more than a checklist of cleared hurdles. Manageable liabilities. A fine young man. Too fine, really. He’s not a layabout. Not a spelling champion. Not secretive. But he touches everyone but me. Strokes them. Rubs their shoulders. We just nod hello with a gravity as if we are one another’s graveyard, we know there’s no reason we can’t laugh, soften, smile, but habit, you know? It’s a misbehavior somehow and inappropriate and starting something there’s no reason to start. Maybe no desire.
I think I only fixate because I know how to do it. Oh, so well. I know how to glow with a want that means as much to me as world peace. I know how to watch him in a room and fume when he drinks a couple beers and leaves. I know how to tabulate every other girl in the room’s score on a scale of yes and no. I know how to find myself lacking. I know how to screw up my face and stare in the mirror. I know how to make grand assertions about how I can fix this. I know how to stand completely still and feel as though my cells are reaching out against my will, my body begging for touch, attention, the grace of a lingering eyeball, anything, and finding no respite, leave completely numb and chilled and unmoved and everything that rose is choked back and cordoned off and the spills on Aisles 4 and 9 are mopped up and whatever memory there was turns tea-colored and pinned into a scrapbook.
I sometimes feel like I do this because as pathetic as it is, whatever wretch it is slowly and surely turning me into, it’s a path well-tread. It is safe and regret is some other girl’s problem on some other day. It’s better than the alternatives of both failure and victory, of being chained by the results. It’s better than finding out you’re just a nice guy who can’t spell who likes to go hiking and help people and maybe you like me or maybe you don’t and then, there we are. We’ve chosen our own adventure and page 53 or page 89, either way, we wind up dead.
Still.
We’re the only two young ones. Unattached ones. Good-natured ones.
I know I’m supposed to ignore that.
I know I’m supposed to ignore that, toss back my head, flirt disaffectedly, and not feel like you’re waiting for something better. Even if that’s exactly what I’m doing, too.
