messy

I find it hard to keep you.

...my phone suggests. And I wonder, does it mean you or me, and what am I failing right now to keep, and will I be regretful in the morning in a way I've never so far been? I knock out my teeth on a man's hard chin, then call him a peddler and a fraud while I gather up quick and scarper with my broken teeth. Sip straw-soup for a month to heal my achy throat, but then I'm given new teeth, and forget all the lessons I'm supposed to have learned. Reflect on these, the myriad of things that happen to and at and for me while I patient-wait for the bus. I like to fold my arm, imagine the syringe breaking off inside the damp crook of my elbow's inseam crease.

You know? Do?

Words like tear-paper of a hunchback double-sided martyr, and I, fiddle across the green-blue fields, sing my childhood and my goodbyes on little tear-away notes on a song addressed to nobody. Talk of power and rules over breakfast, make me forget I've got any, as I sip my orange juice, and hope i haven't made a mistake again, but I have.

I'm so good at messing up my face, and don't tell you all the shame that fills me. I don't want you to worry, but this writing business's like keeping a monitor on at all times, and let strangers see things they shouldn't. Reflecting, refractionary, I should be in class but am scared my head will explode so I play truant. Forgive me, I can't turn for the smouldering of the bush, and fear somehow I'll end up squandering the rest of my life somewhere between two smear-singed leaves.

How much did I drink last night? Calloused and naughty, there's a certain face that accompanies women who drink, and good girls seldom. Relationship with alcohol, except never. I just don't got that sort of personality. I lose myself in dreams and the secreted away emotions between two people, but never substance, though I thought once, and scared half to death someone who was beginning to care about me. The pride of her striding in, announcing she'd have a beer with her lunch. Being the one who made that lunch, being useful.

I overpay for little moments, you know?

I asphyxiate myself with little moments inside little lives. Get hung up, then live inside my head, overblown, oversized. Ordinary moments. The heartbreaking tragedy of longing for a better life. Enter my words into contests and read them inside dainty, tiny print, but them? Will little boy blue ever put his shirt on, and will it even matter, once I've stopped writing about him?

Blast from the past, the face of a man who loved me once, last night, my night? Little boys who struggle with mothers struggle with love, and I wish I'd been more kind with him. Mistook his sad lips and the slant of his nose, but true, eyes was always kind.

On my rugged bare knees, pray, let me play a little while longer, except what's too long? How much can I afford to squander? The older I get, the more aware I become of things growing salient, growing bold. What calls to you won't be ignored or spurned lightly, and am I lying to myself?

Perhaps I'm not yet at the right age, and will suffer tremendously as result, reaching for more than I'm owed. Can I help, or am I still being helped? Will they laugh in my face when I square my shoulders and dust off my haunches?

Is it perhaps growing late?

I wish I could tell you, and I can, but I won't. Re-reading, I spot snippets of a dozen or so different thoughts, all with their own backstories. The characters of the play are almost never inter-connected, except by me.

If anything, this is an attempt at decoding my position in life as a little red strand.

This song has been obsessing me. I know what it means to mistake love for emptiness, and remind myself often that the swell of my abdomen is vital organs, not shame.

Oh, you look so free
The way you use your body, baby
Come on and work it for me
Don't let them get you down
You're the best thing I've seen

...How could anything bad ever happen to you? - I reckon as long as you can dance, you can heal from and survive anything, so I dance a lot, on my own. Or get surprised doing a twirl while slicing onions. Feel embarrassed, but also proud. I feel a thing of beauty sometimes, and is still unusual to me.

This, also. Something that's been heavily on my mind is not forgetting where you've come from. I do believe you step out of the circle of women at your own peril. I think we betray and hurt one another all too lightly in this world. I wonder about the equilibrium between the give and take and compromise that is the relationship between women and men, all in one hand (very big, big hands) and the sacred nature of sisterhood, allegiance through blood and lunar cycles, the things we speak of secretly at market while the men are at work.

These are things we've been playing with for a long, long time, and I think they, too, have their role to play in the position of women in society today.

There's peace at the end. :) Hi, @ablaze.