I think back on the hundreds (yes, hundreds) of stories I started and never finished, spanning a few years. I haven't even tried to write for months and months.
None of it's good enough. :\
goddamn, revising that, it needs to be so heavily edited, but it was just jotting ideas down, I guess. It's so fakking schizophrenic though. daaaaaang.
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The way they talked about it, in the aftermath, they’d make it sound like I did something unreasonable. Like what I did was wrong. That they couldn’t understand why. I thought that would have fairly obvious, you know? They acted like it was a big step, one to the other. Like it wasn’t a clear, logical train of thought to follow.
Didn’t it make perfect sense to you? It was like evolution.
The whole thing was like evolution. I was just adapting, evolving, growing and I don’t think they could handle that I was step up on the ladder. You know people.
They think they’re all that. They think they’re top shit.
They looked for someone to blame, then. Was it the media, was it the family? All harking back to that grim why. Like they couldn’t see the obvious.
As children, we’re encouraged to follow our dreams. Fight tooth and nail for our dreams. That’s reasonable, right? Understandable, yes? The clear, logical train of thought?
It’s not wrong to follow you dreams, is it, then?
Because all I ever dreamt of was being beautiful.
Sometimes it’s not enough. You can watch the days pass by and the weight melt off, and the smaller your stomach gets, the more your pride swells in your chest like a bird about to burst. The smaller your waist, the more you try to follow their eyes. Are they watching me? you think.
But it’s just not enough. Oh, sure, for a while, you get that
“Oh, wow, you look fantastic!”
And those sullen eyes that watch you sway and sashay past. Like you’re the only girl in the room.
And god, you just want more, more, more.
But it’s not enough. It’s never enough. It’s thin, the thin line. The thin line that tells you how to be thin. Dictates how they watch you. The difference between desire and a sideways glance, or intervention stares.
The bird just keeps trilling, higher and higher, just about to burst.
Pop.
Oh, no, no. Those builders’ boys, fat men, slick and broad with fur on their backs and crawling up their necks like fields of stiff, black weeds curled down to the earth by wind. Dressed in wife beaters and luminous vests, with lunch boxes. Sullen eyes, and with a vast repertoire of vulgar catcalls.
If you’re going to pick a target audience, you gotta set your goals just right. Be realistic, I mean. And for a while, I picked well. Pedigree.
They were just kilograms that melted away. Like there was ice under my skin. Lots of sloshy, rippling ice under my pallid skin, that would sink to the earth if I was static too long. Gravity would pull at my ice, and I imagine it would be blue like Blue Heaven slushies and like Blue Heaven slushies, would taste not like any particular flavour, but just like something inexplicably blue.
Blue, and melting, and I grew beautiful.
They work themselves up for it, day after day, you know. It’s a slippery slope. Week by week.
“Hey, slut, suck my dick!”
“Hey you, bitch! How much?”
“Yo, pretty girl, come sit on my lap and I’ll show you a good time!”
Like any slippery slope, it’s hard to stay in just any one place. And unlike how beautiful I became, where my reception grew and swelled like the bird gradually, the fall was sudden, like one day they looked with new eyes and saw the outline of my beautiful ribs, or my beautiful cheekbones, or the beautiful, deep shadows in my wrists. And they returned, sullen eyed, to those packed lunches and to scratch their windblown field backs.
I would sit in the café across from them, watching their construction site, and ponder. I would drink invisible coffee (coffee had too many calories) and pretend to read my four month old magazine and try to look busy. And watch them. And watch her.
I heard her say her name was Maria, once, when the young man at the counter had asked her from beneath his eyelashes.
The easiest way to solve a problem that needs an answer chosen from many is a series of elimination. Which is simple enough, and perfectly reasonable, right?
She, who had long, shapely legs, big breasts, long blonde hair and baby blues. Those baby blues.
Because everyone has to start somewhere.
Maria would walk past the construction site every day as she went to work (“Maria’s a pretty name. What do you do?”, beneath eyelashes, “Oh, I work at reception in a veterinary clinic”) and every day they called to her.
“Oh, sexy lady, wanna feel my cock?”
“I’m hard for you, slut!”
“Want some of this, bitch? I’ll stick you all night long!”
They never stopped. They never started. Every day. Constant. Reliable. Like the sun rising or the bitterness of invisible coffee.
Does it make sense yet? No? Well, I don’t think you understand that some things are necessary. Some things need to be done. It takes sacrifice to achieve your dreams, you should know that. And it’s not like I was asking for much. I didn’t want to be an astronaut or a fire-fighter or a doctor.
It’s not like I was asking for something like that.
It wasn’t my first choice, and I tried everything else. But I staggered and stumbled in those heels, and padded bras made me itch, and I would dab blood from the tender spots on my peroxided scalp and contacts made my eyes water.
You have to understand, it was necessary. It was a last resort. If you can’t empathise with me, you’ve never had a dream. Dreams are what life is made of.
And life needs secret plans.
I was running out of sloshing blue ice, and I was running out of time. Sometimes I would grow faint as I sipped my invisible coffee, and words jumbled before my eyes when I read my four month old magazine.
What? No, I don’t think my sense of urgency clouded my judgment. It’s not like I wasn’t in my right mind. I knew what was going on the whole time.
So I’d start following her home, you know? At first, it was just to see how she lived, what she ate, and how she moved. The way she inclined her head and had smooth, subtle smile that was charming and coy. The way she would lie with the phone under her face, watching television and talking amiably, intimately, her baby blues glazed over. The way she walked up stairs, or how she would press herself up against the walls of her apartment, almost seeking to melt into those baby blue balls.
Baby blues floating in inexplicably blue Blue Heaven.
The way she cried when she watched old, sad movies, or the way she would walk around her house naked, singing old radio songs into her blue toothbrush that washed and scrubbed away blue night blues that gathered in baby blues under her eyelashes.
I would sit on her fire escape, just out of the reach of light, and watch her. I would incline my head and smile subtly. I would curl up on the cold iron and pretend I had a phone under my head, and whisper amiably and let my eyes glaze over. I would press myself into the chilled, rusty iron mesh and grate myself to shreds, with no baby blues to bob in icy blue Blue Heaven. I had no toothbrush to sing to, and no sad old movies to cry about. No where to walk naked, no stairs to sway up and down.
I started to scrawl a signature on dirty sheets of newspaper.
Maria.
A little curl on the M, and the rest was scribbles, and the I was dotted with a star. Like she did when she signed her outgoing mail. Mail that smelt like her. Like soap and flowers and fruity lip gloss.
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oh if you were wondering, it just gets Frankensteiny from thereon in.
