This may be the strangest form of communication I’ve ever had, placing my secrets on public display with a code of memory to crack it. World War One never was so fun, this is something else entirely. This is the crossword puzzles that earned the daily bread of those men and women in the mansion in England, this is a slight lithe form of a showgirl in somebody’s theater bed. I’m wearing a full metal jacket, baby, come get me out of my head. Download a membrane of forgetting to be scared of consequences. It’s ridiculous how fast I kissed that man.
Tell me a story, please. Save me a little from myself this evening. I’m alone and I’m not used to it anymore. I’ve met people and found that they are wonderful. It hurts.
I imagine myself from the outside, a small girl dressed in faded blue, a small room that doesn’t signify much beyond some innate inability to put clothes away in drawers. I know I’m contagious and I wonder why. There’s nothing here. My surroundings are papers and books and tiny pieces of coloured glass, but there’s no structure, no meaning unless you have tweezers. I used to be a bit of a dancer, I used to be a bit mercurial. I don’t know what I am now. Someone who might be wounded, someone who might be a little more broken than she lets on. There’s a little bit of laughter, but that’s not myself. I used to think that everyone had a day the feelings stopped.
I’m reading The Story of O again, chapter by chapter while I’m at work. Last time I read it, I had to get my mothers permission to take it from the library. (I wonder if she remembers that. It was in a stack of adult fairytales. She posted recently, my mother. She mentions that in reading my journal she realizes for the first time just how much I used to go walking at night. “At a certain point I knew she had her own life.”)
I’ve decided to try and serialize something similar, just because, for the first time, maybe I can. I have to start doing something. Someone recently mentioned inferiority complexes and I had an attack of “how well am I hiding mine?” I assume if I ignore it enough, brazen my way through enough ridiculous situations, it will fade away to never pester me again. It’s a possible fallacy I’m willing to try. I’ve been ground down like a worn stone, passed from hand to hand, losing its edges. I’m better than I was, but I need to be better. If I’m ever going to get out of here, I can’t be tripping over shoelaces. I need to be on top of things, I have to have a brain with some validation.
