I smolder across the land like a plague---
Ok, not really, but that's quite an image, isn't it?Heh.
I found this the other day while I was looking for stuff.
Thought you might like it.
I was Janis Joplin last time. Or maybe Jimi Hendrix--no, Jim Morrison. Definitely something with a J. I don’t know who I’ll be next time, and I rarely know who I am this time. But I do know that the tapestry of my infinity is spreading out all around me and I have a gap to fill. So, onward I press. Jim Morrison. Yeah. And I have a feeling that once I was a Medieval princess--I still look like one. Somewhere in the past of this current life, I was burdened with too much feeling. Now I am burdened with too little. Everything is distant and untouched by my heart, unabsorbed by my soul.
Heavy stuff.
Man.
And another, heavier still:
Widow.
She had said the word so many times that it almost sounded pretty. She had said it so many times that it had lost its flavor, lost its meaning. The repetitions had started out as a way to make real to her something that had only ever been intangible. She remembered with a hint of a smile, the first time she had discovered that words and names can lose all connotation if repeated enough times. She was in the backseat of her mother’s car, little girl legs sticking to white vinyl as summer air swept in through the wide window. They were rounding that bend where Dublin Road passes the turnoff to South Shore Drive—she smiled again, as she worked her mind around the logic to remember whether it was South Shore Drive or North Shore Drive because they had always seemed backwards to her. Now, she lived in a land of straight roads and “mountains to the east”—the compass was completely ingrained in her life. There, in that lush and rough country, she had never known north from south or east from west. The ocean was technically east of her, but with the jagged inlets and crooked harbors, it was never a direct line. North Shore drive was at the bottom of a hill, so to her it seemed like it should be south, not north. As they drove along that stretch of the road, she had repeated her cousin’s name to herself and after a few runs, there was a distinct flavor of newness about it—a disjointed jumble of sounds instead of the instant picture of his face in her mind. She would spend her life obsessing over words, and pushing them out of her mind with the force of ten fingers on a keyboard, pulling them into herself like a long-distance swimmer coming up for air. Words.
And now. Now she had found herself face-to-face with a word that had always meant little more to her than someone else’s abstract loss. She was supposed to slide this word over her others, like a shawl. Mother, wife, sister, daughter—layered over her like Victorian era clothing, each one adding more weight to her small frame, each one feeling awkward at first, then growing as comfortable as a well-worn pair of shoes. This one, though, this new one…she wasn’t so sure it would ever conform to her shape. The newly forming lines across her brow whispered of her worry that it would change the contours of her body as surely as the loss itself had changed the periphery of her vision, the path to her eardrums, and the arrangement of her taste buds. Everything was new, everything was unfamiliar.
She was too young to be the wife of a dead man.
She sighed, and then instantly regretted it. She was sighing too much lately, and it made her more tired.
That one I'm reaaaallly planning to continue with, but you've all heard that before.
I am such a non-finishing-starter!!!!!!
Bah.
Happy Tuesday to you.
Put on a bra, you damn hippie!
(heh) |
posted by Bored Housewife at
4:22 PM
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