It's hard to enter a room without soaking up all the emotion in it. If
you watch what you're doing it is okay, because you can absorb amazing
quantities. Just take in what wants to be observed, one quick coast
across the surface, the prepared face. Then slide under the surface of
that to find the secrets. It can be done. But a moment's inattention
and you're taking in too much, more than you can. Or should. Touch of a
hand and you have cleaned the spill and taken off the layer of the
surface and now you've got a mess you didn't mean. Something to cover
up. You shouldn't have seen that, you say, that shouldn't have
happened, I shouldn't know this, it was too secret, but also you keep
looking to see if that's really what you saw. You cannot pretend for
long that you intend the best if you are going to insist on being so
curious, yellow and blue.

And it's hard to remember that most of
what you absorbed was meant to be discarded. You chop insults and carry
grudges all day long, til there is no time left for anything else.
Squeeze the secrets from you and there will be nothing left of you;
squeeze away those things you weren't meant to keep and you will be as
empty as the cracked bowl. In the absence of what you've collected you
would be so empty that you could never be filled; not even suitable for
folded bits of paper. They wouldn't throw you out because of
sentimental value, and that is all.

So this is what you hold: nothing of your own. Nothing you were meant to have.

In this act, you are the one who doesn't get hit. They throw all kinds of shit at you and the trick is that you knew where they were going. You'd be so pretty if, they say, and the knife lands a millimeter away. You never used to, they say, and that hits below the belt but it's still just a shade off. Four knives, five if you count the one, and every one of them is short of the target, because you were the target and you stood so still; you were always ready.

In the next act, you ride on the backs of lions, or horses in a pinch. It's always glamorous.

And now you conjure. In this world, you create empty spaces where people put their secret wishes and then you fill the emptiness. Flowers, a scarf, a rabbit: the thing that is missing. You return what you stole at the beginning. Or better you give back what they didn't know they lost, and they act like you did them a favor. It is not a surprise given your skills of prestidigitation that you would would always wind up with your own hands empty. You flourish.

And now the crystal ball. There will be a beautiful person, your other half, you say, and they look past your plain face and transparent tricks to this ideal. Elusive. You fill the space until the one they want is there. They trust you, believe you, they could sit at your table til dawn looking at the props you use to tell them what's obvious. When everything you said comes true they say they always knew it anyway. Shove some paper at you, and they are so gone they were never there, and later they swear they were never at the circus.

Then there's the trapeze. So many things to be balanced. And throughout, there are the moments where you stop and wait until they clap, and they clap until their arms ache, though what you love most is the moment before the first applause. And sometimes you do it knowing there will be no applause. That they will wander back into the dark and not even know what a show they saw, thinking that this is just how their lives go.

And then there is a tent, or some space, and there is something to take off the greasepaint, and then you go to bed. And tomorrow is another day.

Here's what I think: I think we start adulthood with some basic materials. What happens with those materials is further shaped by experience and history, by artists and knives, by time. But there's this basic, this fundamental material that is who you are.

Like say you're marble. Hard and cold, and one artist who tried to work with you froze to death at your feet. Chip away what doesn't belong he said, and then he lay beside his tools and never woke up. Or you might be clay, thrown down and raised and fired. But you're still marble; you're still clay. I didn't go with the glass metaphor here, because I think shatter might lose its power if I throw the glass around too often, but don't think I wasn't thinking about it.

My point is that life shapes you, but your basic self remains the same. If you've ever gone to an elementary school reunion, you may start to think your basic self was already pretty clear at age six, but I'll give leeway for an undefined self before adolescence, maybe before adulthood. I don't think adults change. And this is why I don't forgive. I wanted you to be one thing. I believed you were one thing. And even if you stood before me again as seemingly perfectly etched, every line an echo of the words we spoke, the dreams we screamed under trains, there are the promises you broke… even if you looked as perfect as a wedding cake, I can never now forget that you're plaster of paris, and you've never even been to Europe.

I'm not saying nothing's possible. People change, or we are the change we are looking for, or spare some change. I don't mean that change can't happen. But there is a difference between a change in appearance and presentation (which I believe is –which I know is– possible) and a change in the fundamental nature of a person. I thought you were marble until I felt your true measure and realized how fake something could be. You might say nicer things now that you used to; you might even now say you had loved me then. But I believe you're still an imitation, no matter how clever, and I expect that you can never love anyone half as much as you love yourself, and that's why I don't listen to anything you say.

Or another story, because I don't think there's nothing but betrayal in the world, you know: I thought you were gold. I wouldn't have traded you in the worst crisis; you were too precious to think of trading, though I knew your weight and its worth. You have changed shape, have been beaten and reformed and worn as one woman's decoration, one man's teeth. But I saw you shiny in the river and my history was changed by your glint in the light. And days or years cannot tarnish you. I know this much is true.

_{*"your seaside arms" is a phrase from the song "True" by Spandau Ballet; it was meant to be an allusion to a line from Nabokov's "Lolita" about a girl's "seaside limbs" ("“But that mimosa grove the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since.") The songwriter made the allusion to impress the woman who had given him the book. She reportedly missed the reference. This is the problem with making obscure references. I wouldn't know anything about that, though.}

Yesterday I said words I didn't want to say and when I woke up my mouth was covered in blisters.

I
think it's either this or that. And this is not okay and that is not
okay so why do you care if it's this or that. Rewinding the film and
looking to see when it turned. When I should have put my hand out. My
hands are out now but they are empty as cages should be. It is the
strangest mourning.

Then I spent hours reading old stories and thinking about how I
used to be and what that was like. How I met gods and stammered before
them and what have I done with any promise I ever showed except break
it. I'm very good at very little other than saying what's wrong, which
I say loudly and often and my face is made of lemons.

Last night, I cooked chicken and carrot curry, chopping the onion while
listening to the Cure (briefly considered Counting Crows, which also
makes me cry), and served it over cous-cous, with a little chutney on
the side.

Sometimes I'll do anything to make myself laugh. I mean really what else is there.

She's been all over the house this past week and I really wish she would go. She fair stinks it up with her lipstick-tipped cigarettes and the sour lemon drops stuck together in the candy jar. It is not merely that nothing is quite right, but that nothing is ever right at all. Screams at me for leaving the bathmat on the floor and calls me a gypsy slut, refuses to speak to me for a day for calling her a whorehouse proprietor ("ma'am", I'd said), and marks everything I write with red pen. Gives me books she says I am too stupid to understand and dolls I can't play with, their glassy eyes sitting in proxy judgment when she's out of the room.

Over ten years she's been dead and I still don't have a happy memory that I can lay her to rest with, and so she comes swooping in periodically, too much make-up and a housecoat, like an evil Auntie Mame, with her quirky anti-charm. I have no beauty, no brains, no redeeming features, nothing to recommend me. Just in time for Christmas this year, which she managed to bile up when she was alive, and I find myself not wanting a tree, lights, anything, just because it would give her one more thing to find failing in me.

We shared a birthday, birth order, and red hair, and I am terrified every time she comes around that someday I will turn into her.

It is interesting to note how many people seem to equate not admitting they are wrong with being right, when they are so much not the same thing that they're at least as opposite as wrong and right.

1. In the future, I live in an apartment and my other friends are also in the
building, and we visit each other and have coffee and cakes and wine
parties and conversations that are endless because we will finish them
tomorrow. There is collective shopping and a certain amount of gossip.

2. In the future, I live at the cottage and have in particular chickens, maybe rabbits, and also some
vegetables I've learned to grow, plus apples and berries, and somebody comes once a month with
necessaries and my hair gets wild and some people think I'm a little
crazy because I know something about herbs or whatever.

3. In the future, I live winters in Greece or someplace warm, leaving when the rooks
arrive from Russia and coming back when they're well and gone; there's some small place where the tourists go in season and I walk on the windy beach in the morning, and in the summer I come home to the beer garden and the ordinary life of trams.

Oh the nights of hot weeping how I would like to have them behind me.
So much else behind me now that these few things are weird stragglers,
they're like the people who went to the bathroom too long and got
ditched by the group and they come back all abandoned but instead of
having the sense to quietly leave they think they can get the party
started again on their own. The party is over, you can go home now. The
rave has lost its ravey flave, the… yeah I can't top that. Go away
now being my point.

What is hard about being a grown up is remembering that you can be one
all the time. I don't mean you have to give up balancing on curbs because that would be ridiculous. I mean that you do not have to see that boy from eleven years
ago on the street and immediately dissolve into terror that he will
hurt you again, that you do not have to alert the teacher to the bully
while letting tears in your voice, that you do not have to fight back
against perceived authority by sulking louder.

It is funny how knowing yourself can make the same amount of things harder.

I was asked to be wise recently, whereupon wisdom fled me entirely; it
is entirely true that I am smarter for anybody than for myself and will
say soothingly to you to go ahead and be nice to yourself you are fine
a good person lovely inside and out, here is dark chocolate here is a tender
kiss, here is warm food and good books and my love, while some small part of my mind is searching
for a nice hairshirt for me, something in large because I am fat, and
something that is easy to put on because hideous girls who are all
thumbs can't get dressed in the dark, I don't mean can't get dressed
nicely but seriously, why can't I work these snaps. I need a pullover
hairshirt with just that little bit of lycra. No really I'm actually
fine.

I have this picture of Gustav Klimt in his garden wearing something by
Emilie, and I want to learn to sew well enough to make one for me, for
the three of us really, and one extra for you. I will make them in
burlap and silk and soak them in wine so that when you visit you can
spill over the sides as much as I do. And I will listen.