RUN

I.

            There is a little girl with bright blue eyes staring warmly—no, fondly, fondly at me from across the claustrophobic, no, crowded (just crowded) room, from behind her blonde pigtails, the blonde pigtails that frame her fragile, no, cherubic (this is the perfect word) face.  Her mother (her beautiful, tall, and inviting mother) calls to her daughter, her voice echoing across the bricks that are these walls, no, dripping down these walls, no coating them, drinking them, doing something liquid to them that brings us somehow back to honey. 

            No, this is not the beginning.  This is not how it goes.

            There is a little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes and she is staring at me and every time I look back at her those big blue eyes fill with tears and she starts howling for her mother, who isn’t there.

            No, not that. 

            There is a little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes paying absolutely no attention to me because I am thoroughly uninteresting in physical design and she only wants to draw things that also have blonde hair and big blue eyes and small fingers and small bodies and small thoughts.  She is drawing a picture with crayons of the Crayola nature, and these are the only kind of crayons that she will use (for the name, not the quality).  She is drawing a picture of a house she says is her house (not now, but one day) and there is a cat and a dog and no parents anywhere and an old-school mailbox on a post at the end of the driveway; the sort that can be driven up to for rapid mail deposit by a mailman who will not have to turn off the gas or step out of the truck, and this makes him happy enough that he beeps before he drives away. 

            No.

            I am a reluctant narrator, because what is true is not nearly as inviting:

            There is not one girl, but three little girls standing in a living room window, side by side, transfixed by the early evening spectacle which consisted of a team of rather bored looking firemen working to extinguish a tree that had been ignited by a fourth of July firework that their father may or may not have fired.  The eldest of the girls has an eye-patch over one eye to correct its lazy nature, and a manner of walking that their father has labeled “pigeon toes.”  The middle child has saucer-like eyes bulging out of her otherwise tiny head and adult-sized, long and thin fingers; massive matts in the hair that she refuses to brush out (it’s too boring) and hunched shoulders, and she has no idea what her body is thinking.  The youngest one is cute enough to win free cookies at bakeries with her mischievous smile, which she gladly accepts, and after she does she responds to the coddling by spitting a wad of gum on the floor, or with a salute from her middle finger. 

            I am a reluctant narrator, because what is true is not nearly as inviting. I am reluctant, because when such stories begin, a wise listener might pause for a second and consider walking away, before they run. 

            But I was watching one of the random late night talk shows the other night, and they had a musician on (Moby), and the host was complimenting him on his many talents, to which Moby responded, “It’s the only thing I can do.  If I have to change a light bulb, I’m flipping through the yellow pages.”

            This is the only thing I can do.  

II.

            There is this bar called Casa and it is a world of bricks and signs that say “open” and “closed” and “We have Connect Four, Othello, and Chess.”  It is decorated with jungle-like plants, and has a reputation for being a land of hippies that say the word “dude” a lot (which, in case you were wondering, can be used as a measure of intelligence--or lack thereof) and offer you hugs as hellos even if they don’t know you.  Hippies that listen to the Grateful Dead while others might be inclined to snicker “I’ll be grateful when they’re dead” and spin on the green and beat on bongos until 4:20 comes along when, of course, it’s time to take a break from spinning in order to get a whole new reason to spin.

            If this is what this bar is to some it is not what it is to me, and if this flavor of person called hippie when hippie is an insult arrives there I either do not see them or I pretend not to, or I don’t care and never did. 

            I know that today, there was this guy in Casa who has been a part of the whole song and dance that is the Casa co-op, (co-op: pooled (smaller) tips, and if someone asks to speak to the manager you are it as much as anyone else) since the beginning of time, and his name is Rat.  He tries to always have a question of the week and I always try to have an answer so I can feel like I am a wise soul on a mountain instead of a foolish one in a bar.  His interrogations have been in hibernation lately, which is okay by me because winter has made me self-conscience about everything in which I was once confident (remember, I am a reluctant narrator) and half-crazed and inclined to tear my hair out over the slightest inconvenience, such as lack of toilet paper and whether a celery stalk is all that is in the package or a single part of it.  My answers to his now rare questions have been sketchy and shy at best and utter silence at worst; I am concerned about being deep enough, about allowing enough layers to enter my mode of thinking, and if I cannot find those layers, I wonder where they went?  Did I kill my layers with drugs and alcohol, have I put my layers to sleep by taking boring classes, have my layers rejected me because I knowingly rented a Meg Ryan movie; have they run away forever?

            This week he asked me: how would you define beauty?

            The very word sends electric currents of irritation flowing through me; even broken down the word pains me, the beau which brings to mind courting gentlemen, the ty which invokes a beverage that is often boring and lacks the ever-essential caffeine.  These two pseudo-words combine to be most readily defined as things deemed pleasing to the eye, and I am taken back to the fire my father may or may not have caused with a bottle rocket he fired out of a metal tube.  Or maybe my neighbor caused it.  It was an especially good day for her, she sold me a huge blue teddy bear for fifty cents that I thought was such a steal I tried to talk her up, and she said that price was just for me.  She was wearing her Dolly Parton wig that day with a fifth of Jack where a six-shooter might be, and she was feeling damn fine.  The excitement made it pleasing, the red, the yellow, and the sometimes blue of the flame made it pleasing to the eye; but the burning of one of the few trees in my neighborhood was not, so is this beauty or just a really odd, drunken day?

            I didn’t have an answer, so I told Rat that I would have to think about it.

            (There are three little girls in the window...)

            I have to pause for a minute and say that I firmly believe that there are few people in the world that ever answer “I don’t know” with any honesty. I think we all know and none of us know at the same time, but if you answered a question with “I know but words won’t allow me to speak it” or “I know a lot of things, but the beauty is perhaps in all that I don’t know, in my desire to unlearn, in my desire to learn further just how much I don’t know” you would probably get looked at funny.  Not that I’ve said something like this, or anything…

            Beauty…

            Three little girls in a window…

            …It is the two that are not me that strike me the strongest…

            There is a lot which is meant to be understood, but I am not quite in a place to speak of it yet, so I will start with 0, with the Fool card of the Tarot, the card that says quite simply that something is coming, and yet: I don’t know.  

III.

            In that same bar again, this time struck by the construction of the booths, designed with a height that inhibits you from viewing the people behind you and in front of you. I feel like I’m in a cave, and this vent is just a little too close, and what deep metaphorical meaning can I derive from the fact that it is freezing out but the vent is blowing cold air? 

I watch people who present themselves as heterosexually coupled move in and out of the eating area. I watch as men assume a protective stance with their significant others; I watch as their faces change, as if their lives suddenly hold some purpose because they are in the position of protector instead of one of the guys taking up space that grows increasingly uninteresting the more he talks.  With these men there is an aura of sameness, but with women their reactions to the defensive posture vary, some regarding it with a level of discomfort (am I now to completely abandon my own protection?) some with a level of confidence as if they have finally properly trained this boy to do his so-called biological role.  Others seem somewhat nervous, as if this one could get away from them at any moment if they let the muscles of their bodies loosen, if their thoughts are less intriguing, if their lips neglect to properly cover their teeth and their jaws fail to properly relax. 

            I am thinking of questions of beauty, and I am hoping to locate truth in this.

            I have a memory, and it is of this restaurant, and as I warm to my role of narrator I think I should tell you:

            I am in the restaurant, sitting and pretending to read a newspaper in order to distract myself from thinking that the entire restaurant is on to me and my anti-social ways, because only such a person would be inclined to eat alone, right?  There’s a couple seated directly across from me, in my voyeuristic line of fire, talking in the low pained voices that have come to be the defining point of a couple facing something almost-over; the crucial point when a discovery is made that somewhere along the lines something has been severed or is on the verge of being severed but there is still such a love (need?) that they cannot collectively decide if this is the waking or the sleeping or the dream. 

            Their hands have a language all their own, as they play across the table and find napkins to shred and salt shakers to move and silverware to rearrange, each others’ hands, (briefly), before a straw wrapper commands their attention and I think perhaps a question arises in their heads as to whether or not that moment of touch was something acceptable, or something that has now ventured into the realm of taboo.  Though their hands sometimes meet, their eyes never do, and I can see their fear both of seeing something and seeing nothing, they seem immobilized by hurt, and the conversation seems to stop because the mere act of opening the mouth could cause a flood, and this is a restaurant...this is a restaurant.

            I dramatize their argument, I place myself in their pain, because it is a place where I have racked up many frequent flier miles.  I wrestle with the almost uncontrollable urge to place one hand on each of their shoulders (but, you know, not in a hippie way or anything) but in a way that might make them feel like an angel is leaving footprints down their backs, while offering them advice that I have no place giving and that they’d best ignore, just so that I can feel like a calming point in their private storm. 

            Even my metaphors have gotten away from me. 

            I consider interrupting with a touch because I understand fully the curse of considering oneself too civil to scream and too weak to openly cry in a public place, though it doesn’t really matter now does it? 

            As they continue to move objects around the table, and swallow hard, and look a little too furiously for the waitress, and stare at fingernails that are not broken, and watches that don’t move faster upon inspection, and shoe laces that are already triple-tied, I begin to think that it is perhaps only when you love down through your fingers and toes that such silences happen, that such table rearrangement and napkin carnage occurs.   Because love allows for hesitation and not a storming away, a thrown glass of water, a broken engagement, a recycling of promises that have never meant much of anything at all.

IV.

            I am sitting now on a Sunday (the Sabbath for some) and I am watching the church herd file in from a morning of worship.  This big clay mask that is strategically positioned above the entryway of the restaurant like some kind of mythical guardian is staring down at me and asking far too many questions (it too, would like to know what beauty is); about the three little girls, about the fire, about why exactly I am still there when the sun is on the verge of setting and Vitamin D in the winter is a damn important thing. 

I watch the faces of these folks, I am looking for that thing, that signal that they have wrestled down the Holy Ghost or had some sort of intensely spiritual moment that allows their faces to take on a whole new glow.

            A lot of things make me think of God, but today thoughts of this fashion appear mostly because I have just run into this boy who appears in everything that I write as “that boy”; and I am thinking about how some things just aren’t coincidences, and you meet some people for reasons, and sometimes they are good ones.  As the like (you know, the “like-like” which follows the regular like, which is really, in essence, a lengthy introduction) rolls over to love, some communication with the divine becomes all the more obvious, more obvious because you are doing something beyond biology, something that plays with the spiritual, or perhaps I imagine it appears.  But I know that I created a character in a story once called the spinach-head woman, and he loves spinach, and that is enough to make this encounter cosmically aligned to me, today, when as e.e. cummings would say, yes is the only living thing.

            Reader, I have talked about this before.  I had a conversation a few months ago (though it seems like years ago now) with someone who was once an enemy until we both decided that was rather boring and there are too many interesting things to say for silence. 

When we decided that it was probably okay that both of us love the same boy, because it seems like he has enough love for both of us.

            We sat in this Cantina while she drank a margarita with salt and I drank water…just water…well, and coffee, and I was doing something of a monologue because there are times when I find it next to impossible to shut up.  Sometimes when I do this it is a purely caffeinated reaction and I have little control over the flow of mixed metaphors and hair-brained conspiracy theories that come pouring out of my mouth; and other times I am just on and what flows flows like water, feeling like the essential nutrient that water is, feeling like 65% of the human body, just feeling ON.              

            I am telling her about the difficulty in knowing nothing, in the admission of knowing nothing, and how close that guides us to enlightenment.  I am telling her about the way women have been downplayed in many religions, but if you look beneath the surface it is not infrequent that a feminist voice is found.  I am telling her how people have lost what is lovable about religion, and somehow this drifts into a discussion about men and how since women have the dubious honor of two X’s while men only have one, we have the obvious advantage over them.  They have but a single X and a single Y, they never quite have enough, just a little bit of a lot of things until they come to forget that they have either one at all and covet completion.  Perhaps in dating women they get the other X they crave, or in dating men they somehow come to cancel each other out.  Good God, I had not realized until today that I am a damn genius. 

            I am not to be trusted.

            It doesn’t really matter what I said, the fact that every third day I fancy myself a miracle makes me so far from enlightenment that thus far it’s only a rumor, and I fear I will be born and born and born before I am every truly ON.  When I allow for a moment of silence to receive feedback from her, she gazes at me with a starry expression and tells me that she never met a woman before who talks this way, who talks about such things, who speaks words beyond the trademark cattiness and dimestore gossip that is stereotypically the conversation of women.

            Beauty?

            I am just a know-it-all.

            Three little girls...

            Reader, there is something that I must tell you, there is something that I do know: There are many books that I could label influential, but it is Oliver Button is a Sissy that changed my life.  You see, Oliver was an unhappy young man, because he didn’t like to do the things that boys liked to do.  But see, he was good at tap dancing...so good at tap dancing that the school bullies crossed “Oliver Button is a sissy” off the school wall and wrote in “Oliver Button is a star.”  I have applied this lesson to my life, and reader, I am still working on it.

            Sometimes when I am in the throws of writing, I think I almost lose consciousness and completely dissolve into a world of words, and they seem to grow and multiply and spread across the screen under my command and I am on a whole new plain that is utterly untouchable by those that have not dragged themselves to this level of obsession.  I am that star, and this is where I am at home, and this, this is when I receive a visit from God and I know I will soon have a lot of thanking to do.

            This is the only thing I can do.

V.

            I am a reluctant narrator. 

            A confession: it was requested that I draw my vagina the other day for someone’s art project.  As much as I would like to blame my lack of drawing skills for my failure and call it a day, this is not entirely true.

            A confession: I was in this bar one night, and I was steadily growing drunk, and I told a girl that men who have preoccupations with plugs and wires probably have a fear of castration.  She was offended by my “penis talk,” as I discovered later when her boyfriend approached me.  He told me that he explained to her that my strange manner of speaking and observations of the male preoccupation with genitalia were okay, because I’m a feminist. 

            There is something beautiful in this, something pleasing to the eye. 

            It never occurred to me that there could be such thing as the feminist defense.  In my odd moments of irrational behavior I’ve always been quick to pin them on a long family history of mental illness, (a fire that may or may not have been started by my father).   Perhaps this will come in handy the next time I am pulled over by a police officer who would like to know just how fast I was going young lady.  I’m sorry officer, I’m out of control.  You see, I’m a feminist.  I’ve always counted on Mentos and laughter to do the trick; I never realized I had a secret weapon built into my manner of thinking.

            Excuse me for lying face down on the ground.  It’s not because the ground is cool and soothing, it’s not because I never got to play in the dirt because I was too busy playing in the concrete, it’s not because I’ve never smelled anything that I could describe as “fresh” without thinking of a douche commercial before; I’ve been known to perform oddities, as a feminist.

            I couldn’t help falling asleep while you were speaking.  It’s not that I’m rude, nor is it that the subject matter that you are beating into the ground is uninteresting and your delivery is exhausting.  We just get sleepy, us feminists. 

            My reluctance as a narrator...now that can be somehow traced to feminism...

            This essay does not end here, it does not end with five.  Five is a terrible number. If your table had one extra leg, you would probably cut it off.  If you and a friend were having a sword fight with two other people, and another person jumped in (making it five) things would seem a little unfair. 

            There is more to be said.

            And this, this is really nothing.

            I cannot end here.

VI.

            There is a young woman staring at me, no, looking--no, observing, observing me from behind the fingers that hide her face, hide her face and cover (no, cloak) her trouble-making ways with the illusion of shyness.  But in spite of her attempts to cover (no cloak) I know exactly what she’s doing when she swallows me into the mirror in such a way that there is no escape, and this is where I’ll be forever, searching for the piece that Lacan has said I’ve been missing ever since I saw the superiority of my mirror self. 

            No.  This is not how things happen.

            There is a little girl that is a mixture of Asian and black who lives in a house with lesbian women and gay men and goes to the progressive day school where they learn to respect the environment and different cultures and in general love the world.  This little girl draws pictures with a box of crayons that have not been tested on animals and will in no way harm the environment on a piece of 100% post-consumer recycled paper.  She starts in the upper-left hand corner of the page and works her way down to the bottom right corner, fully aware that every square of this sacred page has been designed to not just count, but COUNT.  She draws a picture of a mail-person on foot (to save resources) dropping off all the mail that isn’t junk with addresses written on recycled envelopes into the mailbox located to the left of the compost pile.  She does not see the fire-persons across the gravel road because there aren’t any, and there is no one tree, and the many trees are not going to burn for a reason that doesn’t involve lightning or natural accident, and has nothing to do with father and fireworks and three little girls.

            This is damn wrong.

            This is the truth:

            There is a young woman with a carefully concealed though steadily growing lump in her throat because she has lost the language that she shared with her sisters; she has so drowned herself in the skin of an intellectual that she feels that she must lower herself instead of access herself to speak to three little girls.  She has forgotten that it was Shel Silverstein that brought her closer to God, Marilyn Sadler, not Charlotte Bronte, not Caryl Churchill, not anyone or anything Victorian or Marxist or Capitalist or Antagonist and intimidating and supposedly smart.  She has spent five years in this institution and has mastered the art of fooling herself into believing she knows everything but is just now beginning to see the ways in which she knows nothing; the ways in which no matter how often the question is posed to her, she will never have a place on the mountain until she can answer all the questions the same. 

            I am a reluctant narrator, because what is true is not nearly as inviting.

            There is not one girl, but three little girls standing in the living room window, and their father didn’t start the fire.  The neighbor with the Dolly Parton wig and the six shots of Jack made bottle rockets and tree fires the new weapon in her on-going war with the owner of the house, and therefore the owner of the tree (I cringe when I say that, but not in a hippie way or anything).  The tree was extinguished just in time. 

            I am within this brick building that is turning to a brick prison because I feel that I can not leave because I am waiting for something, something that perhaps the mask knows but doesn’t feel inclined to tell me just yet, staring down at me with it’s mocking eyes.  My hands are taking on the red and cracked look of a woman who’s done too many dishes, and the rings I wear every day out of habit are starting to leave rings of their own after they’ve been removed, because that metal just got too damn hot under that water.  My hands, operating along side and not separate from the hands of my sisters, who have been the source of my ever-developing humor and voice, and the God that brought forth all three of us. 

            There was not one little girl.

            There were three.

            I sometimes forget this.

            Perhaps beauty was not something meant to be thought of in such a manner, when it lives beyond explanation, and when my lack of answer becomes the most intelligent answer I have ever allowed myself, when I have had just enough caffeine that it is impossible to shut up.   Perhaps I should just barely remain in my skin and spend a whole day watching sunrise turn over to sunset, and perhaps then I will be able to greet them both like a child.  Maybe then I will know what childhood is like. 

            I said there were three little girls in the window.

            I didn’t say anything about children.

            How much I have learned...

            I know that it does not matter if I cannot speak it in my Native tongue. 

            If only I knew how to speak. 

            This is the only thing I can do.