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.
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Let’s just dash across the page and say things as though we mean them.
Let’s just throw back our shoulders and say ENOUGH ALREADY.
Let’s just pretend there are options and the best of which is staying in bed together with the sheets made from bamboo that are so soft and cool against the skin and we’ll plan what we’ll do when we inevitably win the lottery and they’ll necessarily solve the world’s problems with a lasting and total world peace.
Let’s pretend that we are always able and willing and excited to eat our vegetables.
Let’s pretend that we remember the anniversaries when they need remembering and we don’t tear ourselves up when we forget the ones that didn’t matter anyway.
Let’s pretend we have the grace to carry over our mistakes and our failures without ripping up our own countryside in outrage.
Let’s pretend that even if we don’t know we can pretend we do know and find a stone on which to step.
Let’s pretend that the problems are simple and visceral and based on caveman instinct. That chemical reactions are the way the great unknown plays out our destinies on the stages of our bony frames. That a scientist could solve it if we would just lay on his table and let him begin an examination, an excavation. We could be the trail of bodies that leads to a vaccination and no one will ever suffer so again.
Let’s pretend that nothing we says has any impact whatsoever and that accountability is for people who are running for things.
Let’s pretend that the things that make us feel better are things that will kill us if we touch them too much. Let’s kill them with spears and fire and never want them again.
Let’s lay out a picnic on bearskin rugs and get a tan.
Let’s misplace our glasses and have to get in very close to see if we’re rolling our eyes at one another.
Let’s not try very hard and get away with everything anyway.
Let’s be twice as long and half as good.
Let’s miss one another all day long and let every minute apart drive us a mile further into madness until we wake up lost in a bedlam of love.
Let’s shake tambourines and run down every roaming troubadour we can find, shackle them to our radiators, teach someone tall to play bass, and start a band.
Let’s find this anxiety in our heads, the one that brings us near to nausea when we pull into the parking lot, the one that tells us that if you worked harder you could make it rain the money that was needed, that if you were willing and brighter you could double time, you could make it happen…let’s find that thing that is making you dizzy and overwhelmed and shape it into a paperweight. A touchable, tangible thing. Something that can be addressed. Let’s not fail to breathe.
Let’s just call the whole thing off.
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Strange day. I feel kind of at ease in a way I didn’t yesterday, or maybe haven’t for a while now. It feels like summer, it feels joyful. It feels like how John Denver felt in Aspen. Like there’s air in the lungs and all is worthy of our praise or at least our kindest set of eyes. This includes ourselves. And yet, that air and that praise is spurring me on and bringing me here to the page where I was sure I would be too exhausted to do anything of worth. Maybe that’s true, but I’m here.
Oh, the beauty in the world.
I am wanting to go to the Shakespeare Festival this year. I’ve said this for ages, but I am longing for it. I am longing for the beautiful air and that outdoor stage and that wit so crisp and bright and like a dancing star. I want to go with some nice guy, but there’s a serious shortage of those about these days so I’ll have to go with one of the usual knuckleheads. I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream there as a child, as a guest of my father’s friends. I felt so grownup and giddy with the atmosphere and the play. It was a 50′s inspired version – Puck as the Fonz – this gorgeous sequence where a girl falls asleep to an old-fashioned radio on a porch swing opened the play and I was drunk on the tipple of it all. It was memorable in every way.
We’re talking about going to the renaissance festival tomorrow. This is traditional. I’m going to wear my dress and get my palm read or my cards read and not worry too much about the rest. I want certain experiences to be certain ways and when they’re not, I get kind of hatesy and bitchy and miserable and a few of these blog postings are reason enough for you to encourage me to stay mellow and just enjoy the cleavage and boys in tragically awkward leather harnesses traipsing across the faire grounds in 90 degree heat and mispronouncing privies. PRY-VEES, you say, m’lord?
It may be said that this is where I got the amber for my magical, eh, not so much?, necklace. Maybe it needs to go back home to be activated. But it was Baltic amber and frankly, I don’t got the airfare, magick necklace so commence with the love powers or GTFO.
Really, I think tonight in my exhaustion (I hung around to make a minor fool of myself at the city council meeting, but what else is new?), I’m feeling fairly good-natured about my situation on the whole.
There’s all these parties to look forward to throughout the summer, too. Galas, second proms, steampunk balls, picnics, barbecues, artist receptions. One where I need a glittering gold dress, in fact. It is a little bit exciting, isn’t it? Even if you’re an invisible girl, it is quite a social calendar to maintain. I’m focusing on the fact that I’ll be able to have whatever time I want to have at all of these things and I can dread them and hide or I can just go.
I can just go.
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