Mush; Ugliness

[rinue]

After a full night's sleep, I woke up exhausted and half blind. The world has stayed hazy, my movement round, my thinking cotton soaked in oil. An out of place day, skittish and smeary.

I don't know what to write about these days, or who I'm writing to. I have subject matter, but the right frame escapes me. I don't know what to think, how to analyze, what to value. Purgatory. Depression, but without the depression. (Ciro's line; my paraphrase.) Paranoia, too; alienation. Rooms full of lizards. My instincts aren't telling me anything.

I've become known as the person you like to have around. Not the person you like (although I am not disliked), but the person who knows the score. (An opera saying, coined by Maria Callas.) I'm called on to settle debates, double check work, know schedules, give approval. I'm told I know everything, admired, resented, tolerated. There is another Romie at the school (she spells it "Romi"), which I resent; I hate hearing "Romie" when it doesn't apply to me, my family.

I'm practicing closing my left eye. I've always been able to wink the right; I need to be able to wink the left. For now, I keep both eyes open when I look through the viewfinder; always have. A holdover microscope habit.

Saw my reflection in a shop window - bare face, blue jeans, sweater, french braid, none of it any disguise for my curves, my flush, my readiness to be plucked. This is not fit subject for conversation, although it defines and focuses my existence - too much of the body, too intimate. Oh, I want.

I continue to despise the term "boyfriend," which never but sounds condescending; I hear an eye roll every time. Just the word is enough to cast aspersions on my motivations, to compress something grand into insignificance. I wish I had a Puddleglum to stomp out the fire.

Sometimes I start to cry unexpectedly and all of a sudden. I only start; I never reach the crying part. I use my right hand to push it back in my mouth. London; Boston. Neither at home in the house nor at root in the garden; ivy stabbing pitons into brick. I am wildly off center, centered across an ocean. I don't know where I'll be living in three months, so I live in both and live nowhere.

I've been stepped on three times today with full weight, backed in to, clotheslined, slammed with a backpack. A man on the bus repeatedly tried to put his elbow through my head; this went on for ten minutes, his continuing bewilderment when his elbow encountered resistance (a similar bewilderment experienced by the woman who brutally mashed my foot just now and then apologized to the person next to me, who accepted the apology). I had to say, firmly: you have to move; my head goes there. The man reacted as though a cooked fish had spoken.

I don't have much music with me; couldn't fit much; couldn't decide what to bring; made Patrick choose. I listen on loop to "4th Time Around," apocryphally Dylan's rebuke to John Lennon for the Dylanesque "Norwegian Wood." It sticks in my head during class, over and over: I never took much. I never asked for your crutch. Now don't ask for mine.

Most days, I wear silver sneakers that were a gift from Patrick's mom. I wonder whether this would make her angry.

You'd better spit out your gum.

Comments

Re: Boyfriend.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I must say, I have trouble thinking of Ciro as a pet; I have trouble thinking of Ciro as tame. "Fiance" seems to confuse people here; many of them don't understand why anyone would get married unless somebody was pregnant. For the present, I mainly settle for "partner." I don't like the ambiguity, but I do like the expansiveness.