I have been without the Internet for a number of days now. A series of unfortunate events, but all is well for the moment. How I've missed thee...but I haven't even really written anything in a while. This is just some disgusting rambling. Purging, they call it. I'm working on something more satiating.

At Bible camp, I used to sit just inside my door, back to the cool stone wall, and listen to the banter of the other girls waft in through the ventilation slats as they ran down the halls. They were getting dressed for something, some dance: curling their hair, staining their lips, spraying themselves with discount perfumes. It was a new world for them and in their minds, boys still cared how they looked. They fawned over their arched eyebrows and too-tight pants--surely they must, because they just kept right on looking.
I seldom participated in this game because I seldom had any intention of going to the same dances. I spent my time living inside a notebook, chronicling how empty all of it made me feel and how ironic it was that God would create men that only loved us for the colors we splashed on our faces and the curls we ironed out of our hair. That's some kind of unconditional, even to a fourteen year old girl. I guess I had no point of reference, as that previous summer, my parents had divorced after one fourth of a century. I sampled that world from just outside the vestibule, letting the flashing lights echo across my face and hands. Even permanence fell apart in my young eyes, and I had nothing to add to a conversation about God or love.
Badly-drawn Bryan knew me before I knew myself and he was as close to unconditional as I've ever had. He was well aware of my developing form as I sashayed into adulthood, so I hid myself in shame from the rest of the world. I dyed my hair black and let my bangs cover my eyes, dressed in shades of grey and green. I existed as a funeral procession and mourned for a society that never knew me. The walking anachronism, the misplaced child of the twenties and thirties was less of a person and more of a little anomaly that people never use, but display on bookshelves next to the owl and angel trinkets and the Tolstoy and Ibsen that they'll never actually get around to reading. Bryan never saw me as misplaced, but as his own. I could never stop him--hot breath, strong hands, and sharp teeth. Even when he was gone, I knew I was caged and that no one would listen. I'd run away screaming, but the humidity of the night enfolded my words and sank them six feet under. His mother was a respectable leader and a smooth talker. No one listens to the country bumpkin, shelf-ornament girl when she cries wolf. Everyone's a wolf now, thinly veiled in sheep garb.
I forget about him, sometimes--Dr. Freud would have quite a bit to say about that--but never for very long. All it takes is a casual encounter, a brush of knuckles or the thickening of the air before a kiss, and I can smell his sweat again. I feel Saturday night humidity pressing on my skin as he pins me against the stone supports under the bleachers. They say that when the time is right, memories will fall away and my mind will be as clean and pure and expansive as freshly-fallen snow across the Delta. They say out with the old and in with the new, and that my life is too valuable to waste as a wallflower.
They repeat these lines while stuffing their ears with white wool to drown out the sounds of the little girl down the street, screaming out her lungs as she loses another battle.
You live with dignity, you don't die with it. There's no legacy.
They say that this too shall pass, but the war is won and the dust settles onto my hair like a cracked porcelain doll.

Labels: awkward, books, brokenness, bryan, disturbance, owls, regret