The Rise of the Paper Dolls

It is a strange thing, to realize you are alive. That you have a muscle pumping blood through a body and to a mind and you are alive, and you can do things and be things and be so deliciously stricken by emotion that saltwater comes out of those eyes through which you can see the entire world around you. It is a strange thing to realize that you are really and truly alive, yet you continue to stand there, complacent. Should I not be sobbing on my knees, in awe at the wonder of what it is to be alive?
And yet here I stand, or I shuffle about only when nudged because for just a moment I almost realized that I was alive, but then I forgot again.

It is a strange thing and sometimes I feel like a sentient toy. I stand with my arms straight out to either side and I crinkle as I move, when I move at all; I am bent and folded as I’m dressed to suit random fancies that are rarely my own, the paper doll of some cosmic child. Snip snip I am the shape that I am and I didn’t ask to be this way. Snip snip I exist where there was once just white blank space and I didn’t ask to be at all, but now that I am it is good to feel the breeze on my magic-marker face. To meet paper friends and speak of paper-things, like whether the pencil hurts when they color in your skin. To have a two-dimensional heart capable of only such simple things as can be easily understood; none of this arteries and veins business, this bittersweet and melancholy confusion that plagues a body with sinew and bone, with the all complexities of blood and gut and heart, all the weaknesses and risks of a mind.

I can smell the cherry-scented magic marker that was used to draw on this mouth that speaks only the words that are given to it; no more, no less, no words of its own and thus no blame to fall upon that little cherry mouth.

So easily we can be crushed by an ill-tempered whim of the universe, and so easily we can be recreated; it hardly matters that we dolls exist at all. But we are dolls and we go on playing at our little paper lives, rushing about by the demands of our little paper timepieces. Our little paper fears and our little paper joys, the little paper children with their little paper toys.

We are little paper children playing with matches. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. We are little paper children caught on fire.

I can feel the smolder, a slow crawling sting, and I don’t even know it as it eats me up because there is laundry to do anyway, little paper shirts and little paper pants to fold.
We do the little paper things in our little paper lives and none of us see the burning. Or we don’t want to see, or we think we have time.

Why not more urgency? Why won’t somebody do something?! Someone should do something, someone should scream why isn’t someone screaming?! Someone do something call someone; oh dear God help us, we are burning and we don’t even care. We will soon be dust and we don’t even care.

I want to care. I want to care and panic and scream because I am alive and because I can and because I am the paper doll becoming real. How did I not see it before, the angles and the planes and the curves, right there for the eyes to gorge on? I want to be alive in ecstatic wonder at the concepts and the depth and volume of everything and everyone, and the third dimension that we paper people have been ignoring for so long. It’s a strange thing to realize that there is so much more to do than slowly burn up; slowly burn out.

There should be a celebration; why isn’t someone singing? We don’t have to be this way. Why aren’t we dancing all the time? We can join the third dimension, leave our paper skin behind. Why aren’t we running? We have to hurry.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Dear God help us, our paper skin is burning and even I am beginning to care.



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Better Dreams

In some of my better dreams,
I am the monster.
I am the disease.
I am the one with sharp teeth and lethal speed.
I am the thing that is toxic;
I am the mutation they cannot eradicate.
I am the strangling weed that steals the sunlight.
I am the fear monger;
I am the bright red power of a nightmare.
I am no longer the one in the corner;
I am what chases me there.
In some of my better dreams,
I find safety in being the very thing
That brings me to my knees.


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Letters Never Sent

The space in the car around me feels hallow, as if not even I exist to fill it up. Maybe it’s the darkness, or the glow of the dashboard lights. The radio breathes thin tendrils of music into the empty air, where they dissolve somewhere between the speakers and my ears. Song lyrics always remind me of some person or other. Sometimes several people, sometimes ones from years ago who in some way left their own little wrinkle in my brain, people phased in and out of my life. There is no one else on the road so my mind wanders, and in my head I write letters. Letters I will never send because it’s been too long, but things I’d like to say nonetheless.

Dear Whom-It-May-Concern,
Goodness, I’d forgotten about you until this song played. I guess that line just had the ring of ’97, crawling through sheep pens at the county fair. That’s where we met, two little children wallowing gleefully in the dirt, hiding from the searching eyes of our parents. I just wanted to pet the animals, but I think you were making trouble, the way you beckoned me to follow you through fences and into the arena. I hadn’t planned to go that far but you had whetted my appetite for adventure and there was no going back. Did we get in trouble for that? I don’t remember. But I know you watered a seed of mischief in me that never quite died, even after all of life’s attempts to eradicate it. Looking at me now I don’t know who would guess it, but it’s still there, that itch for a little innocent trouble. I’m glad you were there to help it along when you did.
Nostalgically,
Elise.

Dear Anonymous,
I don’t remember your last name; after all, we only knew each other through similar confessions. But through what you had the courage to admit, you helped to let me know that I wasn’t the only one. And at the end you had such kind words for me; I think I still have your note in a box somewhere. The box painted black with moons and stars, and words from magazines pasted on with diluted Elmer’s glue. We made them together and yours turned out prettier, but I’m not supposed to say that. I’m supposed to say it’s not “better”, just “different”. But we all knew a good craftswoman when we saw one, and I think you knew too; you were just too nice to agree. That was sweet of you, and for some reason your subtle gestures stuck with me.
Fondly,
Elise.

Dear So-and-So,
You threw me for a loop, you know that? You were once royalty to me, but now I seem to have forgotten how to bend my knees at all. I’m not saying it’s your fault; I don’t know how it happened, really. But of you I will say that it’s strange to have once been so sure of something so utterly phantasmal. Don’t worry, though; I don’t blame you. You had no idea who you’d grow up to be. Clearly, neither did I. I think what I saw in you was squelched by the time we were eighteen, cut up like your favorite pair of jeans. That was never very fair, was it? I was sorry for you then; I still am. When we were children I thought we’d always “keep in touch”—isn’t that what you said? We mimicked the grown-up phrases of our parents, as if we had some control over our little lives. We never anticipated being swept away by such different currents, and such foreign ones. What an interesting phenomenon to analyze beneath the microscope of what I know now. I’ve studied it a thousand times but I don’t think you ever bothered to look. That’s alright; it matters far less than I once thought.
Apathetically,
Elise.
P.S. I’m sorry I made fun of your glasses that one time. I didn’t mean it; in truth I liked them. I wear glasses now, too.

Dear Such-and-Such,
I don’t think I’ll ever forget that night I showed up at your door, sobbing, shaking, tears and nose running; I thought Satan himself was at my heels. We barely knew each other's names but you took me in like an injured puppy and read to me verses of God’s courage, and thus you ushered me through my first panic attack. Of course at the time I didn’t know what it was; I only knew that, at that moment, I was a terrified nineteen-year-old infant. And in that moment of complete helplessness, you took care of me.
Gratefully,
Elise.

Dear Recipient,
You always made me laugh; you always made everyone laugh. Granted, your jokes were at times inappropriate for the child I was at the time, but I thought they were funny anyway. A parent’s nightmare of a babysitter, you encouraged my brother and I to jump on the bed and make prank phone calls. It’s probably been seven years since I heard from you, even after I wrote you that twelve-page-long letter. I still have the one you sent to me before that. I don’t take it personally; I know you have your spells, your pains and anxieties. I know it’s been a long time, but I hope you know it’s never too long. You could always come back; you could come jump on the guest bed and eat all the pizza, sing parody versions of Christmas carols and my parents would tell you what a bad influence you are. They’d be smiling, though; they miss you too. Maybe even more than I do. I don’t know what it was this time that made you disappear, but I wonder how you’re doing now and if whatever demons are still haunting you. I hope not. I hope you’re alright.
Pensively,
Elise.

It would be strange to say all these things now, after so many years. And maybe it’s better that way, though I’ve always been a fan of open communication. So many things left unsaid and the road stretches out in front of me; there are still several exits until I’m close to home. My wistfulness remains. The music continues to unearth memories and on and on they go, these letters-never-sent.

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Passenger Seat

I try to read as the truck rumbles along the highway on the eight-hour drive from Louisburg to Dallas. My inability to concentrate frustrates me; it is a particular problem at the moment. I read a page but cannot remember a word I’ve read, let alone process the information. Lupus picks at my brain and makes me forget things; makes it hard for me to keep track. Facts and phrases flit futilely in and out of my head. Little thought-mice scurrying around inside my mind, their little thought-claws struggling for a purchase in my brain. But lupus makes the surface slick; they just slide right off again. And I forget. I forget things from years ago, from last year, from yesterday. Little things—things someone told me; things I learned in class or on the radio. I sigh and rest my forehead on the cool glass of the car window and wish there was a way to explain to everyone that I am not really as air-headed as I can appear at times. I just have a rebel-brain, tossing back things that have been thrown at it. I shake my head, shake off the discouragement, and look out the window.

The steady motion lulls me into a sort of trance. Random thoughts begin to play just behind my forehead, vaguely spurred by the scenery.

“Janet’s”, reads the sign of a bakery we pass in a sad little town. My hazy thoughts begin to wander. The name “Janet” has always sounded crass to me, and sharp, like the sting of a yellow jacket on a hot July day, or when you’re chewing something crunchy and bite your tongue. A name you’d expect to find, I think, in this flat little town of Savannah, Oklahoma. This town with patched-up roads and ragged lawns, full of houses with peeling paint and blankets tacked up inside the windows with their air-conditioning units hanging lopsided from the sills. Little houses surrounded by chain link that separates the dogs from the bitches, the pit-bulls from the children. The children playing with their broken trucks in their cat-soiled sandboxes, passed over by the vacant eyes of adults in stained tank tops with cigarettes dangling from their slack, jaded lips.

Janet.

The name—the town—has a rusty bite that makes me morose. I see a girl in booty-shorts sitting on a weathered, sun-beaten wooden porch and I think of the splinters she will get beneath the skin that was meant to be covered, defeating the very purpose of clothing.

I’m glad we are only passing through, though the way I judge sends my gaze to the floorboards.

Small towns swell into big cities, which eventually give way to acres of empty pasture. We drive through them all, like moving through a timeline of the rhythm of my life. I seem to live in a series of ebbs and flows; mentally, emotionally, physically. The swelling and abating of everything, and whatever it is, I know its only a matter of time before it comes and goes again. I think I’m almost to a point of giving up forced structure; of letting myself live in a way that comes naturally to me. It takes a letting go of conscious control. It takes trusting oneself, and remaining impervious to the unspoken instructions of society. I am terrible at all of the above, but I don’t know how much longer I can fight against my natural bends, struggling to align with a predetermined grid pattern.

I know what needs to be done, in a way. I need to keep deepening the shadows of my life and brightening highlights, increasing the contrast with hints of color and line. I could make something of my own, I think, something lacking a particular pattern but still somehow, inexplicably, making sense to me.

But, like most of my art projects, that will take time. Much longer than this drive from Louisburg to Dallas.

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To the Spider that Lives where the Cupboard meets the Wall

Why you live in the bathroom
Where cupboard meets wall
Instead of the kitchen,
My bedroom or hall
I’m sure I can’t guess,
Because, I assume,
You still are not safe
From rags and vacuum.

Why not a corner
Or crevasse or crease
Where your web could last
For more than a week?

Out here in the open
The strands get torn down,
But there’s never a day
When you’re not around.

Whether over and over
You spin the same silk
Or are replaced by friends
Of similar ilk,
Still eight eyes watch me every day
Brush my teeth
And wash my face.

Fortuitous indeed
You should end up with me,
Who will not crush you
Or swat you or scream.
But don’t forget your place and all;
Please stay in the corner
Where cupboard meets wall.


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Some Challenges of the Spoken Word

People say things, right? Isn’t that how people are supposed to interact, by speaking mouth-words? That’s the impression I get, anyway. And apparently one is expected to respond relatively quickly, without taking too much time to process. Conversations should be slower things, I think. Is it alright to say things that don’t necessarily need saying?

When I’m quiet, I do have things in my mind. Things I could say, I suppose; things I could make into words and push off of my tongue for other people to hear. But I ask certain questions of myself before saying things. Like Who Cares? Is what I am about to say genuinely relevant to the conversation and its participants? Will it make someone think? Will it make someone laugh? If the answer to all of those questions is “no”, my lips often refuse to move. But I’m never quite sure if that is the right decision, because I tend to experience many awkward silences and I can’t help but think that it’s my fault for not filling up the space with words.

On lugubrious days
I get the impression
That others may notice
My verbal recession.

Sometimes on desperate impulse I will regurgitate some vaguely-related phrase from my mind, whatever is floating closest to my mouth. How very spastic I must seem, stretches of silence awkwardly punctuated with puzzling interjections and broken responses. Then sometimes there is nothing floating nearby and I feel a solid white space behind my eyes, a catch in my throat.

I need to make
More words with my mouth,
Build them on my tongue
And then push them out.

I suppose it doesn’t matter very much anyway; everything I have to say has been said before, if not by me then by someone else. Any concept my little brain could possibly conceive has surely already been thoroughly wrung out by minds brighter than my own. Why bother saying what has been heard before? I’m only twenty-three; I don’t think I’ve lived long enough to say new things, or even to know very much about old things. Why bother saying something that is not new, or that is essentially unproductive?

Sometimes I feel like a ineffectual robot: inexpressive due to lack of data, then randomly activating in sudden bursts of short-circuiting gibberish.

I think I am better at the letter-format of communication, when I am able to contemplate my words. To edit them, to see them somewhere other than my head-space before they are announced. I make more sense that way. Why do you think I write so much?

I pronounce to the world
Some stuttering sounds.
They look at me strangely;
I’ll just write it down.


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Young Woman, Old Things

Lately I’ve been making new things out of old things. Re-twisting bobby pins, cutting up my brother’s old t-shirts. I can’t say they are turning out very well, but I’m making them nonetheless. I’m a resourceful person, I think. My end product might have bare joints and exposed seams and duct tape showing through cracks in the surface. It may appear a slovenly structure, but the things I make are as stubborn as I am and they will hold unless deliberately disassembled. They will be sturdy. Impractical, perhaps, and maybe there was an easier way, but this was my way and it worked, despite all the detours. You can’t tell me it didn’t; disheveled as I am you can’t tell me I didn’t show up on time. You can’t tell me it didn’t turn out ok.
I know, it was supposed to turn out so much better than "ok". It was supposed to do so much more than simply “function”, a mere meeting of requirements. But I have such a hard time letting go of the messes I’ve created because, in their own ways, they work for me. Maybe not as well as something else might, but my clunky old things seem so much safer than all these new things, gleaming with the lustrous chrome of possibility. How very intimidating.

There is a new break in the fence around my neighbor’s pasture. It’s a good place to look for old things; the house there was built before the first world war. When I find reels of rusty wire or old pots and pans all corroded and full of holes in the woods a ways from the house, I like to think they were left behind by the farmer that was called to fight, or by his grieving wife who could no longer bear to remain in the home she shared with her only love now passed.

Today is a surreal day here in the woods; strange things balancing precariously on the tips of the branches. I reach up to pull my head back onto my shoulders but it is so light it cleverly evades my grasp and continues its floating about, wandering aimlessly. It is looking for the Strange Things. Then we see one, my head and I. It has leapt down from its branch and scattered itself all over the ground in the form of white, hard things. We move closer and my heart leaves my body to join my head above. They are bones. I wonder if they are human and I venture closer. They are rib bones; humans have ribs. There are vertebrae; humans have those, too. My heart flutters in my throat, imagining excitedly the crime scene tape and uniforms that will cover the area once I have made sure of my discovery and called someone. 911? City Hall? My dad? I don’t know, and vaguely it occurs to me that perhaps I have been watching too much Criminal Minds.

I pick my way around the bones and finally see The Skull, half-hidden in the grass. Pretty purple, yellow, and white flowers are springing through the eye sockets and out from between the grinning teeth, life and death careening into one another, the wreckage cumulating in this eerily cheerful display. My heart settles back into my body, though, as I approach and see an ivory snout poking out into the grass. They are cow bones, probably a calf dragged here by the current resident to be disposed of by coyotes. Poor little calf. No more crime scene tape fantasies or intrigue; just something dead. Do the bones smell strange, or is it just the lofty imagination of my hovering mind? It must be my imagination, because these bones are clearly Old Things, half-buried and sun-bleached. When I realize the age of the bones suddenly they seem more peaceful, as if quietly laid to rest in this sun-dappled forest by the brook; as if the little calf has long-since forgiven the coyotes for desecrating its remains. Death is coexisting serenely with the life around it, and I sit nearby to listen to the water and watch the skull-flowers rustle in the subtle breeze.

Old Things are safe things, my floating head tells me.

But New Things are exciting, in a frightening sort of way. I just wish I didn’t have to let go of the safety of the Old Things in order to experience the adventure of the New.

Because I do so love adventures.

Take me on adventures but make me feel safe, too. That’s probably too much to ask of you, but I figured it was worth a try.

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