She was sickly aware of being one of millions in her country. one of billions in the world. Any megalomania of her youth had been drowned or subsided into a pale ascertain of some kinda amegalomaniaminority status in the pantheon of petty class passive-aggressive weaker-than-war fare.
She was sick from feeling cold and sick of being stepped on like every footrest in every goddamn hair salon or rickety down home kitchen in the not so deep south where she hailed from. Snailed from. Slow to wake up out that hot and humid daydream.
She knew she could neither recover the day nor the dream. She knew she would not recover, for she had nothing she wished to hide from herself anymore. What she had uncovered, well, it was all the darkness you could expect to find under an old rock toward the far edge of a garden revisited after years of neglect.
She was a despondent girl. Our girl. And still people dared to stare back at her silent icy stare. For they knew her as the daughter of disgust and disgrace. Fuck, she thought, hers was the legend she would carry all her life and to her grave. Hers was the standard by which all could measure, even the lowest of the low, and still be seen as if from below. Her only entitlement for all she was aware, was to be straight up miserable. And to stare.
So she stared. And she could have cared how you reacted, whether you cared or did not care. Or did not care enough not to care or care. Many if not most were subjected (in her presence) to having her eyes upon them. That uncomfortable, unwelcome, malevolent stare.
The silence of falling years of color, could not have felt more free on this day however. She sighed in the chair, having untied her hair. By the weight of her breath, one would not have thought freedom. But feeling was the heaviness set forth in the room, bouncing across mirrors.
Rippling earth through the room.
Folks shied away, children started crying. For what sensation she lacked, she made one without effort. A natural audience surfaced from magazines. A natural uneasiness surfaced from her longstanding psychic wounds and kept people away like the bubbling molten rock of an active volcano. It was said that those who ventured too close to her -- well. all anyone might hear was gutteral cries someone lost somewhere in their spleen. No one needed to know anymore.
She had some feelings about feeling. She did. She was not therefore unfeeling. Who was? She also considered them, her feelings, too. Not to feel might be too plastic. Whereas feeling was often way too dramatic. So she strove for some middle path. Which, despite fair effort, often led her to static. Whats wrong with static?
The silence that followed or preceded both her stares and her static. She considered it. This silence was beautiful, she thought, like her glock automatic. This was her gun, not a clock, not a toy. She found it beautiful yet deadly. Two incompatible traits. Incompatible but not impossible? Her gun was something she kept neither to use nor enjoy. She found it in the pond by the old shed, where the shallows found coy. Some spirit had told her she would find it there, and not only that she should or could (because truly she had no desire to!) but that she must go and retrieve and polish and learn the gun. She did so reluctantly. Then sent the spirit away with her stare.
She was not homicidal. her parents were decidedly pacifist in the wake of all their bloodsport they boasted of in the ledgers they left her. Suicide was dystonic to her. She knew this clear as her favorite drink in her hand; one part lemon, one part tonic. She held it up quickly at times when her arm and wrist faltered. Or to prevent its being corrupted, maybe? or any darkening of any light. She was hard to figure.
The rock ice she loved to chew into, or maybe just the sound that sounded of her teeth up against it, like they were gonna shatter painlessly. Somehow. Her teeth. These were the things she had every right to look forward to, her ideas. Who was anyone or herself to take her away to some pragmatic reality? What kinda place to live is there in the heart of what so obviously presents itself to us? No one could answer her.
The rocks in her glass, the ice they came in contact and chattered. Moving rocks of ice, how much an oxymoron. She loved that rocks could chatter. That something frozen cold could move quick and lightly float.
She loved how every single day, under the weight of her great sorrowful stare, another sucker came to pass and misinterpret her, another one who missed the boat. This of all she knew on earth, well, it had to be her undeniable satisfaction. In a world that gave her little solace from her bloodlines. In a town that needed no court for all its judges. On a path that led to no particular welcome outcome.
The silence and her favorite drink, the feelings she did or did not feel, the strange form she took getting bigger herself every day as they tried to make her small by cruelties they inflicted or unkind words they would say, those around her... what influence had they? Maybe some. Maybe alot. But she tried to appreciate the ongoing evolution of her self. In trying she was almost able. And she tried to appreciate her almost as much as she could, and almost she could.
In subsidiary was the account of the days of her youth... through a precipitation of all things heretoformentioned and avowed... through the fallen rain of colored locks of hair... through which all ugly jaundiced countenances saw to the unconditional freeze of her powerful icy stare...in this antiquated world of salons and sociopoolitical theatrics of penelopes and patricks...of bulbs bare and loud enough to make her head ache...
until a dull scream fell out of some poor childs mothers spleen. or so somebody said. Fell out and fell down on the ground with a thud. Like an ice cream cone scoop of dark heavy chocolate. Insensate.
She would not rub her temples then. Postmortem. She would have.
She could not rub her temples then. She would have if she could have.
She did not rub her temples because someone else. Someone else knew.
Someone else knew what she would not do.
Someone else knew that she could not do but would have if she could have.
Someone else rubbed our friends temples with a fullness. A fullness that cannot come of judgment or jaundice or class action. A full indescribable spontaneous burst of parenthetically deserted straight up true natural overflowing.
Someone got her back!
Straight up! so strange! how the only one unseen is all whom exists.
Who shakes up her rocks with a twist of her wrist,
recovers her balance despite deep leaning, the list.
True. When all her luck seemed away from her, our loveless child (of generation x-ers marinated in grunge), drew to her temples (like the strike of a match) a guardian to protect her. Dear Stella, her hairdresser who carried all kind of class.
Ooh how the love came flowing all through her, our girl! and nothing around her so hateful any longer existed! She was the one like her mother, this Stella. Intuitive like her mother.
She cursed and howled with cathartic abandon, as Stella smiled and held her down safe in the chair, caressing the pulse of her dome. Where all calm came to bear.
This healing, this was practiced. Not random. Nine years married to some bastard who could give a damn about her.
Our dear Stella.
Damn him! our girl cried, seeing the blackened eye of dear Stella through the glass and the flying cuts, all the cuts.
Once the damning found expiration through itself, the loving welled up in our young lady something wonderful and self-propelled. Our young girl now young lady, now saw for herself, herself now deserving and becoming as well.
The ground swelled.
Becoming she became a very source of her love. And this set off Stella, who most intuitively picked up on it and cried out...Damn!
Damn, girrl! Bring it!
Now Aint that-the-truth?!
