Sometimes when I look in the mirror I see myself. Other times I don’t see me, rather some twisted apparition that really cannot be me, I think. This apparition is ugly and old. Sometimes I feel ugly and old before I remember that I have never seen an ugly woman.
I’m listening to this album called crush songs and it’s 15 wailing, aching howls and I’m thinking jeez, who would write this many songs about crushing? I find the singer’s pain off-putting, unattractive. It’s too reminiscent of something I can’t name. I listen to maybe half of each minute-long song before skipping it, and the only one I like is called beast.
It’s … interesting. It sounds like someone’s discovered the camcorder footage from when they performed in an auditorium talent show in fourth grade. The sounds echo and reverberate off of hollow walls I can touch but not see. I recently discovered my own camcorder memories of me, four years old, doing ballet with a calla lily in hand. I remember that day and not just because I have video evidence that it did in fact happen, though I wonder if this physical hard drive of memory has encouraged my brain to keep its own recollections intact.
I remember picking the calla lily from my neighbor’s side yard. They don’t live there anymore and neither do the calla lilies. I remember these little white spiders that would hide in the funnel of the flower’s opening. They spooked me a little but they were also beautiful. I remember driving to the dance studio. It was on a sunny little street that probably no longer exists except in my memory. (In recent years I have felt myself return to that street again, though each time I have encountered it it has been in a different city.) I don’t remember dancing. I don’t remember any other person except for my mom. She probably bought me a cookie or a brownie afterward to celebrate my dancing. When I was five years old I quit ballet.
I save all these little snippets of paper where people have written my name — cards from my previous birthdays, a hospital bill, the label from my medication, scrappy notes from in-class flirtations — as if to remind myself that the current version of myself does exist. Or rather, not that she does exist but that she is the same person as the four year old dancing with the white flower. I guess I have this fear that the time and space between then and now is filled with nothingness. It’s scary to have the idea of my previous being resting on the strength of my current memories. I try to fill that nothingness with memory but the gaps remain.
The funny thing is that I rarely ever look through the pieces of paper. I just like knowing they’re there. At times I throw some out when I decide that I can construct my identity just fine without that particular scribble of a name.
I cried when the beast turned back into a man. He was never ugly. He was just forgotten.
this is going nowhere 