pretty pretty princess

Today, I got to be a princess. I swear to G-O-D himself. On a random late-afternoon coffee run, I talked a friend into humoring me with a trip to The Costume Shop.

I was five stinkin' years old again. Iced coffee in hand, I made a beeline for the fat mascot heads. I looked Tigger right in his gaping hollow mouth and grinned toothily. I had to check a mirror to see if all my teeth were there in fear I had actually, physically regressed.

After that it was all down hill.

Even before i put anything I was knight questing for a single costume to try on. In fear of agitating a sweet dressing room attendant I chose a limit for myself ahead of time. I swept through rack after rack of other lives I could slip into and out of. Running my fingers across every sequin and bead that could have been mine in some parallel universe I lost myself to the imagining.

When I found myself again I was inspecting with surprising discretion an entire rack of romanticism. I found Shakespeare's Viola in a courageous, sturdy gown of tan and green. I found Juliet in a dazzling purple garb that sang out with loss and hope. Astounded and slightly abashed, I found myself in a sweet dress of delicate gold and white. With flowers on it. I kid you not. Fragile gold fleurs twirling shyly down the entire skirt.

If you know me you are laughing. Stop. I'm not kidding. This little tomboy will come put your lights out if you make fun of my dress. I'll never be able to explain how I looked into this dress and fell in love, when it is so utterly not me. And still.

When I slid it on, zipped it up, and adjusted my girls, I was shocked.

I lit up. I remembered hours spent in my backyard as a kid, with one of my mama's old bridesmaid dresses spread out around me. I felt our prickly grass against legs that had yet to be shaven for the first time. The far too advanced heft of a book in my bitten fingers, warbling Disney songs and waiting for my prince to scale the chain link fence. I shone. The black smudges squatting under my eyes were outshone by, (could it be?) a blush. Promise bloomed in my chest, and a sudden surplus of blood poured into my limbs lightening and stretching them.

Have you ever wrapped yourself in even the tiniest dream come true and watched it's perfect graceful drape from your shoulders and pool on carpet? It is effervescent. I blossomed in the light of it. Vulnerability suits me. Hope kick's purple's butt as the color that best lights my eyes.

I got back home just in time for some crappy news. I found waiting for me the tear stained trimmings of a life misattended. Just general pooptastic life stuff. You know.

I got a little overwhelmed, a little snuffly. Ok, I kind of cried like a baby. I walked into the bathroom for a tissue and watched my face closing up with exhausted frustration. I saw myself become ordinary again. I watched all that joy get zipped up behind someone else's betrayal. I got ugly, fast.

I was completely amazed at the careworn face in front of me. Where did the princess go? Joyful naivete gave way to a brow furrowed in amazement. Couldn't she live in this life?

The longer I looked in the mirror the more I began to wonder at the simple idiocy. I had chosen that dress because I saw in it the recovery of something so lost to me in my every day. These (oh so naughtily pilfered) pictures bore witness to the fact that the girl in the mirror and the girl in the dress were the same. Worse yet: same girl, same hair, same makeup, same day. Within hours of each other.

Fledgling bravery took root somewhere in the burrow that had formed between my eyebrows right about then. It flourished in an instant and even if it didn't magically transform me back into a princess, it brightened me.

My reverence must be preserved for that stolen fifteen minutes twirling in the dressing room mirror, curtsying to myself in the evening sun. The world musn't keep all it's princesses locked away in dreary towers of hardship, or even mediocrity. We must keep ourselves glowing with our fairy tale hopes. I should try harder to open myself, in spite of the world.

What? I should.


I should dress like this every day.

p.s. Thank you to the Costume Shop for indulging me when I stood in front of the mirror for far too long and talked to you about 90's cartoons. And thanks for not telling when you totally knew I was taking pictures with my phone every time you left the room.

you should thank me.

I saved your life today. No really. I really and truly did. If you are reading this page, I saved you from untold annoyance.

Today I denied myself for you. I put aside my childish self-indulgence for the sake of your comfort.

What did I do? Well, for starters, I refrained from putting a playlist widget on my page. I almost felt the need when sprucing up (a.k.a. procrastinating the actual writing process) to add an adorable little "iLike" to my blog.

I thought some Van Morrison and some Tegan and Sara might be cute. I thought it would give you a little glimpse into the labrynth of my frequently empty mind. I wanted to awe you with my eccentric and ridiculously cool tast in music. I'm twenty-one now you know. I have depth and range in my music selection and was entirely prepared to knock your socks off.

Ok. I'm lying. I did not save you.

I saved me. I put up the widget and then I came to visit my page. So I could get the full "wham-bam thank you ma'am" effect. Music + background + sweet text = a blog you want to go back to again and again. (I mean who really goes to a blog for what's written in it, right?)

Anyway, I got back to my page. And the iLike started playing over the top of my iTunes. Suddenly I got all flustered and in my annoyance couldn't remember where the controls for either music player were. So I just had to listen to that racket.

Let me tell you, The Kooks layered over the top of Dinah Washington should be considered an attempt to deafen a person.

So I took it off. I decided to save you from that horrific caucophony. You may listen to whatever inspires YOU while reading.

You can thank me later. Or by reading again tomorrow :)

borrow

From this distance her feet make no sound on the asphalt. It's disconcerting. I can see the sweet orthopedic roundness of her sneakers moving too closely to the ground to be silent. I can hear him talking of course. If I looked over I'd see his blue eyes aflame and his red hair glowing with the rush of whatever his mouth is saying. The action has a sound. But there is no sound to shadow her cheap shoes. Shuffle alone, no scrape.

I can hear cars rushing forward in their near-gravitational necessity to get where they are going faster, sooner, first. Maybe they are pulling her sound away with them. Maybe that sad shuffle has hitch hiked it's way into happier shoes.

Above the sneakers are the remnants of two long, pencil written notes, scrawled on brown paper sacks. They've been folded and unfolded a thousand times by clammy hands; probably crumpled up and regretted, thrown out by hands of hesitancy. Two brown paper notes, pasted around her ankles to the place where slender calves used to sunbathe on afternoons like these, some two-score years ago. You can see her dreams were written on it once.

But those ankles, even wrapped in all that worry-loosened paper turned tired silk-shirt skin, are too small. She's still a child under it. Ankles that small can't be anyone else's.

I can't look at ankles that small shuffling so close to the ground. . Things that tiny should think they could fly. She's wrapped up in that old wish-paper from head to toe. I know it's there, under a thick kitty sweater, out of place under this blaze. She's pulled it close around her: a blanket against the chill of her loss. Unjustly huddled under so many crumpled promises. It is an ill fitting garment, sewn for another.

She's only three feet from me now, and finally I'm found the scraping like snowshovels, scooping away the drudgery piled in front of each of her steps. Her sigh shakes out of her chest, and shakes the world.

I am not comforted by this arrival, but I know she should be.

Those tiny hands should be held. I should remind her she is a child. It's never happened to me, but I know how it happens. I know how I would scoop her bone china skeleton into my arms and pull her in. I would breathe her in to show her that I am unafraid of the cold, waiting aroma of time passed. Forehead to forehead she could see the absence of fear in my eyes. My bravery would vaccinate me against the hysterical fear of the age epidemic. I would kiss each of her knotted knuckles until my anxious breath loosened the knots in them. I would look in her eyes and seek out the place un-hidable in her eyes. I would wait until she felt the strength to lift her feet.

I would lay her so close to me that she could pretend again that my unlined shoulders were hers, and she could convince herself that the pallor of my freckeled skin was the tangible evidence of her innocense restored to her. She could have for all those elongated seconds the unlabored breathing of my chest, transferred to her, and the unmitigated glow of all my potential for as long as one can hold an old woman in a parking lot, without having the authorities called. I would not correct her. I would plump her with my youth, and pet her cheek until the burning rush of my own circulation had ironed away the days from her face.

My body would be her body.I would not shift impatiently, or brush away the flakes of her age from my dress. She could look into me, as if I were a mirror, and imperfect as I might be, return might retouch me with the softness of an implied, pretended nostalgia.

I would not promise her my life, or renewal. But I would stay long enough to see the first two steps after she left my arms appear as if they were in preparation for flight.

Unto our nuclei we would belong to each other. I would give that to her. Because I see ther child's ankles, and I know her hunger. Because she knows my weariness.

But she's not looking. And I've no voice for calling out and no breath. The ten, now twelve feet flight from my lips is impossible.

I'm sorry.

the melty crayons

I'm drippy. In every way you can think of. I've been a bit of a whiny melting mess. This big strong block of a Bohunk is softening, sliding down myself and pooling at my own base. I've become a slipping muck fo me to step through. And then the loveliest thing happened to me today.
I learned that melty can be pretty damn cool.

Maybe all this melting madness, this mud-luscious glory is it's own season.

Maybe a change of my state of matter is what it's going to take to make a statement about how I need to change what matters?

Or maybe the ridiculousness of my foot stamping, sleepy eyed, droop---

Maybe this nightmare pliability---

Is just where I need to be?

Or maybe it's a stairway...to someplace better

p.s. these accidental glorious little goodies were purchased at the dollar store, and the pictures were taken with my phone . :) and it was just the project i needed. I suddenly feel so much less droopy.

the Rumpelstiltskin effect

This is a chemical reaction. My reptilian brain sucks, basically. There are scientific explanations for why I'm doing what I'm doing right now. There is a shockingly beautiful, intoxicating, delightful, overwhelming, multisyllabic word for why my laundry isn't folded, why I don't have a new job, why there is a big fat plug in the faucet that's turned on full blast, trying to purge this feeling.
I read it in a book. I also paid a very nice hippie lady a large percentage of my savings to tell me that. I thought she was just going to tell me I was not right.I was broken. I really and truly assumed she would assauge me with kind words about how it was a terrible inability to do what I'm supposed to, but that she could give me medicine for that.Or worse, that all she would say was "Mhmm," and "I'm so sorry that happened."

But there are words. Real words that have an entirely different meaning. There are two words that mean i am not constitutionally incapable. In a thin volume, with a beige with darker beige cover are two words that turn my blood to the trembling neon hue of hope.

Tonic Immobility.

Those words are the biggest words in the whole world today. Those words mean that somewhere beneath everything there is a Rachel enhanced. Myself, aglow. It means that since it has a name, it can be fought. It means I will be my own, someday, maybe.

When a human being perceives danger, chemicals are released in the brain that are supposed to tell how to proceed. Our bodies are supposed to tell us how to go through the motions until we can really figure it out. If our senses gather that there is time enough to flee from whatever opponent accosts us, regardless of what it is, we are to flee first. Run. I could not run. i was not fast enough; there was not time or refuge. Upon the failure of flight, something rises up within us. More fear than courage, it boils within us if there is hope, and if our senses asses that we might have the strength, even for a little while, we fight.

For most of us those are the only instincts we'll ever encounter. The threat passes, or is fled from, or fought off. But mice, deer, possums, and Rachel's know of another sort. Mice go limp in the claws of cats, knowing they cannot fight, or flee. Deer stop dead in freeways, paralyzed in opposition to their very will to live. Possums play dead. Rachel's freeze.

We humans with our "higher functions" have another side effect of this tonic immobility called dissociation. We separate from ourselves. I would like to steal the thunder of this chemical reaction by saying that this separation is merely a manifestation of shame at being in the same category as mice and possums, but there is some parasympathetic nervous system chemically mumbo jumbo that would be very frustrated if I didn't give it it's moment. The privilege of dissociation is that I get to watch from the corner as I eff everything up. As theunstoppable ocean of my life breaks agains my immobile toes, eroding my perfect red nail polish.

The moral of the story is this, I got tired. I couldn't run. There was nowhere to go. And I was too damn tired to fight. So I froze. Like a snowman's pee.

But now, it has a name. Haven't you ever felt that burst inside of you when you can finallly put a name to the inescapable fears of your mind. It's like the delicious warmth of a sun-ripened raspberry breaking open in your mouth. Like the release of a bubble popping on a child's fingertips. The incubi that come to haunt you in the night are suddenly robbed of something when given over to their rightful names. The names seem to tame them, to lull them. It's as if you've been pushed against a wall and had your hair pulled and your nose bloodied by some horrible, freckled, snotty, bully and suddenly, his mother comes into the room and swats him across the butt.

It can be such a saddening feeling when it happens to the lovelier things of the world. It's almost worth knowing that when a sonnet tries to match that stomach as a hot air balloon notion it will fall nearly as flat as that chastised bully. All spiderweb flutterings of eyelash against our cheekbones can never compare to the real feeling of lips soft and kind and forgiving against our faces, and still we give them over to language. We seek out the words... AHEM>>>>>

Because I know it's name, it cannot have me, and that is my justification. In spite of the Rumpelstiltskin effect, I would bear faulty testament against all the sweet tinglings of my heart in the name of being able to look something in it's eye and call it it's rightful name.

And so I am encouraged, and thawed by two not so little words: Tonic immobility.

Thank you.

zipped.

"Why are you making me think about this?"


Because you have been not thinking about it for twenty years. I can only attest to the twenty years i witnessed and waited for you to think about it. Unknowingly, I demanded with my very presence that you be better, and could you not be better my four year old voice would sing you to sleep. I sang off key staccato songs about a Jesus who had abandoned you, like your father, like your brother, like your husbands did and would again, like your sons and daughter would one day as well. From my small round mouth came false ballads of a God who could lead you from your bed and the self-imposed night of your smoke-filled room, into a morning of exuberant peace. To your lost, broken heart, I must have sounded like the most vicious of perjurers.

It may sound strange after all this time. You must be angry that it has taken me twenty years to ask you, and when I finally have, it isn't the question you had craved. I could pretend to not know what question you had dared to hope for. You wanted to account to me all of your horrors, or to deny me the privilege of sharing in them with you. Starkly you have tatooed the world's trepsasses against you on your arms, on your face, on your heart, lest you forget and they affront you again. You have painted them in blackest ink across your teeth, so that every word may be filtered through them, stained and flavored with them. Yet the inscriptions on your skin are enscrawled in a dead and language, wrapped up tight and mummified so that it may never rot, never fade. The paintings on your teeth kept behind tight lips, which would never betray you.

I don't want to read them. I don't want to know those terrible things. I see the markings and can see by their shapes, by the angry downstrokes of every letter that they do not bring good tidings. I seek a different knowledge. I challenge you to show me your happiness. Your joys, few or multiple as they may be. Once again I am demanding something of you mother.

Don't deny me, when you have denied me so much already.

want some?

My mama never did, but she made sure to let Van Morrison let me know there'd be days like this. Sometimes i worry that I have some wicket backwards form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. I am the polar opposite of those people who become complete misanthropes in winter. Summer nights make me wistful, nostalgic, endlessly and tediously ponderous in some of the most obnoxious ways. Decisions are impossible. Starry night skies remind me of minstrel cicadas trilling ballads of all the nights I spent on swings at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, remembering a naivete i never actually possessed. I can spend hours remembering myself remembering a self I only hoped I was. It's enough to make your head spin.

No man has ever spent the time romancing me the way I've spent eons with the nighttime breeze romancing myself with these vivid daydreams of night skies and golden wheat fields that i'll never see as clearly again. Somehow the langorious days around me reflect in those in my head and form an infinite mirror, each remembered reflection more beautiful than the last, and there are never words to put it all down. I am never ever able to quite as aptly paint in black and white times new roman font the same picture that idles and hums around me enhanced and reflected again through the amber light of my nostalgia'
.

So it pools inside of me. Finally and eventually, right around September every year it brims out of me, salted with regret at my inability to say, to show, to share. I cry at the selfishness inherent in not being brave or smart or poetic enough to give it to everyone. To see or feel it. How it runs throgh me, heart like a drumbeat trying to pump it through ever inch of me, to fill every capillary with blood turned to honey, made sleepy by delight and the sudden knowledge of each cell, nucleus, mitochondria to sing; to glow.

My conscience thrums with it's imagined culpability in being unable to give it away. So Dinah Washington, the salt on my skin and I will be in the backyard listening to the blues, drinking ice tea, waiting for the nightfall, missing lightning bugs.

don't tell anyone.

That’s her. Standing there in the pink dress. Pigeon toes and dark sunglasses. Toes turned in in too tall boots. Choking back the feeling that even that dress won’t make her a little girl again. Won’t wipe off the smeared makeup her skin remembers, from too many nights fighting an innocence she’ll never tell she treasures. It’s hunting dear, clear as day. She’s looking for invincibility, hoping it will inspire her. Inspire him. To see her as she was, brave and wise under her freckles. Hoping those tiny fluttering sleeves with soften the harsh reality that with every passing second she’s farther from who she planned to be.

A shock of fuschia on a grey sidewalk, that dress is the last tether between her and a dream she thought she’d lost. Not a stitch of white on her body, there’ll be no surrender here today.

easy squeezy...stop chasing.

My long game needs some work. I have no damn idea what I want to “do with my life.” And I resent that question. That question has robbed me of the simplistic enjoyment of a hundred starry skies, of the sensation of my hair on my shoulders under a summer sun begging to melt away my fear. I sit up nights. Having arguments with myself. Existential debates. Long drawn out thoughts that end in me completely paralyzed with what I don’t know. Immobilized by the edifice of indecision; I am absolutely horrified but the irrevocable consequence of making the wrong decision. It’s pathetic.

But I also know that twenty-one year old existentialism is about as useful as a golden retriever chasing his tail, and very comparable. We will not catch the meaning of our lives, the faster we chase after it, the faster it has to go to keep up with us. If we do happen to catch it for a brief moment, what in the hell do we think we are going to do with it? Hold it in our mouths until hunger or our short attention spans force us to let go, Drooling on it until heat and the strange tickling sensation forces us to let go and breathe again, and we find ourselves on yet another madly twirling carousel of our own desire to know ourselves.

We cannot, for the most ridiculous of reasons, fathom that we are attached to our purpose, that it is following us as much as we are following it. And because we cannot see that we cannot miss it, lose it, or escape it, we waste our time and bountiful energy searching for what is already ours. We are children, in so many ways, upsetting ourselves with our imaginary disembodiment. I’ve spent so many precious minutes trying to catch myself, feeling disoriented and headless, trudging through a swamp that is not there. All my feeble attempts at divining direction from a sky dotted with a thousand destinations and no paths, rewards me with only a hundred constellations that smile down knowingly at me, twinkling with the mischief that comes from knowing the end of the tale in which someone you love is deeply entrenched.

The most terrifying thing about all of this, is that I KNOW. I know all of these things, the futility of seeking yourself. I feel the ringing truth that I am my only direction, and the things I choose to do and love and see are where I belong, no matter where I am, who I’m with, or what I’m doing. I know these things. So why in the hell am I the biggest tail chaser I know?

overdose?

Pickle number two, that's where I am in the decision making process.

Some people smoke, some people have security blankets, some people call their mother, or go get blitzed; but in my times of great plight, it's the vlassic stork that gets me through. I'm broke right now though, so instead of that cute little stork in his goofy blue hat appeasing me with talk of his crunch, it's Eden Garden Kosher Dills from the dollar tree. I have to admit, they are better. Don't tell the stork though, he gets pretty rough with that beak.
I'm doing okay. The upbeat wannabe punk on my stereo has injected me with enough optimism to pretend I won't finish this jar. But really, I fear that before I know it I'll be huddled in my bed, Max, the homosexual beagle on my lap, arms curled around the pickle jar as I nurse the last bit of pickle juice from the jar like a broke drunk on his last jug of Popov Vodka. My face will be puffy and all wet-looking, I'll and have heartburn and be pretty sure I smell like a salt lick, but still find the engergy to mumble the words to "angel" by sarah maclaughlan in a pitiful little voice.
I'll seriously consider finding my car keys and making a chaste pilgimage to walmart, straight to the canned goods/pickle aisle and straight to the checkout, but when it comes down to it, I'll be content to put my mouth to the jar and just hang out like that for a while, huffing the leftovers after drinkign the juice, not really caring about the stupid red ring that will be all around my mouth like warpaint when I finally get tired of the pickle fumes.
Through every major crisis and change in my life, there have been pickles. No lie. When, in pubescent fear, i transferred schools, my dad came to visit me and he brought me a gallon jar of pickles every other week. Ok, Every week. I needed them; for sustenance and moral support.
When I moved to Denver to nanny , my best friend showed up at my house on the morning of my departure with two jars of pickles and an easter egg full of silly putty. They were gone in the first three days.
Ingredients: Fresh cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, calcium chloride, polysorbate 80, yellow 5, and balls...sometimes balls like john wayne. I could take out a village with the strength supplied at times by those wicked little cucumbers.
I don't need a damn hug and I don't want to talk about it. I don't want your advice and I don't want you to make me laugh. When people make me laugh when I'm supposed to be mulling somethign over I feel this unbearable guilt, like I'm ignoring something important. I start to feel like some terrible little A.D.H. D. child who throws away his meds cause it's more fun to spaz out.

So I'm just going to sit here and mull this over with my jar of pickles, which by the way, only have five calories each. Can you say that about YOUR comfort food? Didn't think so.
I'll be fine tomorrow. That's just how it is.