by Katya Mills, 2014
Anecdote from the cutting room floor, circa 2009 … cuts fresh falling off her aura, this girl. Locks of her soft layers of dyed hair flashing in the fluorescent light for the last time, in silence, her silence, the silence of her stylist, of her boots up on the old steel footrest.
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 amegalomania minority 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.
Part -ii) ::: with tribute to Kurt Cobain, on the 20th anniversary of his young death
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.
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 straight up misery. Not unlike Kurt Cobain. And she wore interesting sweaters over floral button down shirts, not unlike him, beneath her cold hard eyes true. Looking back at you.
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. The uncomfortable, unwelcome, malevolent glossy glare.
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 volcanic.
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?
Not to feel might be too plastic.
Whereas feeling was often way too dramatic.
So she strove for some middle path.
Which, despite her 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
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 - 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... -- to be continued --
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