I am the spoiler who loves a rainy day. And yet, I find myself wearied by this February grey. A Miss Havisham grey, wasting and unforgiving, a punitive grey intent upon freezing time so as to preserve pain.
While I sit, hypnotized by outside gloom (introspecting, yet outside of Presence), a teacher appears. Eleven buds materialize on a single orchid stem in my office.
“Hello, I’m a fat person, fat, fat, fat,” gibes a six-year-old girl playing with the new concept curvy Barbie doll at Mattel headquarters. The girl’s focus group peers bolster her audacity with laughter.
“She didn’t like going to school because she was bullied. She was telling me that girls were saying she was fat and talking about her scars from her transplant.” The mother of Nicole Lovell, a thirteen year old girl murdered by an accused Virginia Tech student whom she had met online, added that Nicole often cried, asking to stay home from school.
We have been duped. The usurpation of Beauty by our obsession with physical beauty is insanity. We have bowed to the moon and proclaimed it the Universe, living in darkness sans perspective, worshipping the tiny moon of a single planet, unconscious of stars and galaxies, estranged even from the warmth and light of our own Sun. We have made the temporal flesh our master and under its relentless rule our children suffer; we all suffer.
A motley of Yule paper promises lay rent in revelation, a fraction of their former wrapped dignity preserved by the stubbornness of iridescent bows that remained dutifully attached. My family lounged content as cats, their desires full from their holiday haul (a fullness their bellies were soon to replicate), while the aesthete in me cringed at the plight of the mutilated wrapping papers, torn to shreds as if by a school of piranhas. As I lamented the long hours spent in the perfection of pretty presentation, I wondered, “Is it worth it?”
A TINY HORROR STORY:
MONDAY.
I saw that sardonic sentiment emblazoned in white upon a pepper black sweatshirt and I wanted it. I wanted it, the real me whose face is not sutured with a counterfeit smile, the real me who is not an innocuous gnat, the real me whose veins course as thrill-filled tributaries to a heart that delights in this tiny rebellion. And so I bought it. And I wore it. And people noticed.
I have been homesick for Prim. Though writing is the only thing in this world that pardons me from the ordinary and grants me certain joy, I will abandon my writing practice like a sad newspaper left ignored on the driveway, condemned to perish to pulp. This time around, I squandered my true love for a trip to the beach, for an over the river, and through the wood turkey dinner, and for the spectacle that is the modern holiday season.