When you’re a young one, young and sensitive, and you miss the universal fashion note that your sweatsuit, perfectly fine one summer before, is now embarrassingly gauche, and you hear yourself being made fun of, a book opens in some unvisited library. A quill dabs into the ink well. A story about what that meant begins.
Even now, I wonder why these words from those girls and their neutral, no, smugly tilted heads felt so painful. Why it felt like getting knived in the gut. It seems laughable that I can think about the encounter more than twenty years on and still feel taut, psychic wounds bleeding like Niagara Falls and sense my body getting defensive for another bout. I know I ran off after overhearing this on the playground.
And I also know I knew something had changed. There was a variety of knowings that existed that I did not have access to before. I was vulnerable, I was stupid, I was naive, my friends were not my friends. I did not have friends. I did not know. We did not have enough. My family did not give me enough. We were poor. We were not rich. Girls in sweatsuits were poor babies. I was failing. They could see me failing and they were laughing behind my back. I thought were friends. I was out of the loop. They wanted me out of the loop. No one told me and I did it wrong. I did it wrong. I wasn’t just gliding by, keeping formation, I was askew. I was being left behind. And everyone knew it.
And if I asked to stop it without money for new clothes, without the right words, without being invited to the other kids’ houses anymore, it wasn’t going to get better. I had no idea how to make it better – this sense that my flesh, my body, my clothing, my clever mind, was unacceptable to my social peers. Diets began and failed, someone said something and my dearest friends no longer recognized me in that way. They fell away over a summer. Like I was a ghost. On the playground, the metaphorical grapevine grew and I’d expected to be there, ripening with the rest of the lovelies who had been around me since first grade. And with a few tart phrases, I had fallen off that vine and dried up below in the suburban sun. My value mostly now in my innocuous sweetness, my banal appeasement, anything to avoid attention despite how all the more I needed it. I needed to be seen and I found two-way mirrors in every direction.
I wish I had drawn on the moxie I would spend decades cultivating a tiny, artisanal crop of to defend myself, but I did not ever confront these pre-teen jerks. Little enough they meant by it, I imagine. I suppose, if I’m honest, I do not wonder that it was this way.
I had enough social literacy to know that you can’t introduce yourself or offer a clever, genial self-description that includes the phrases: enjoys talking to flowers, creating infomercials for invisible audiences or Reading Rainbow-ing to the same. The blood was already in the water for me. I knew that much, especially after that day. Especially after the day, a bit later, when another girl, horse-faced and otherwise forgettable, asked me why I was the way I was.
No one had been talking to me as I raised my hand and remembered the word arroyo for the teacher. I could see the word in my mind’s eye from the reading like I had a set of flash cards. I didn’t know this girl from Eve, she’d never spoken to me before, and perhaps never did again after this. The bell rang and she left me there in the 7th Grade Language Arts Class to contemplate what she meant, what I was meant to say, what my startled silence may have indicated.
My social literacy didn’t let me know how people were taking me, but every experience seemed to indicate that if they were taking me at all, it was as a writer. This Harriet the Spy figure, with a notebook and a disparaging eye. No breasts, no body, and worst of all, not even the actual words that are a writer’s stock and trade. I may have been projecting on them. I may have not known how to reach inside their worlds, but I knew there was a distance that had to be crossed if I were to do it. Entreaties were small, fumbling, and largely, failures. I didn’t trust the people who became part of my social circles, those I sat with at lunch. I was the stopgap before a better offer came along. There was no physical self-esteem. None. And no one seemed to mind. I had shut down in the face of the smallest things and life has run like water around a stone.
Aloneness is not weakness or bravery. It just is. It is a state of self that exists in me now regardless of how many people I share a room or a drink with. It exists in me even when I share and recognize it in others. Even beyond logic. I often crave it even as I’m experiencing it.
Tonight I am thinking. I am choosing to think, to feel, to dredge and troll the old waterways and draw up the worst. A Saturday night special. It is better though than refusing to let any of this touch me. Perhaps it’s the fact that I finally got my next therapy appointment booked for a couple of weeks out. I am getting the bigger ideas, I am hurting the bigger hurts, questioning the bigger assumptions.
What actually scares me is as easily as I chose that I can choose something else. The only thing that really binds me to the past is the story it tells about us now and the thrill of being a martyr in my own mind to a few conversations that happened eons ago. This is the evidence my mind has used to convict me daily when I dare to hope for something beyond the pittance on offer.
Tell a different story and all of this is factual, but inconsequential. It is just a step to the right and the track is completely different. I am entirely worthy, shockingly beautiful, attired appropriately for my purposes, capable of charming kings and unraveling mysteries, and I can take or leave what is handed to me. I can forgive girls for their probing questions and myself for being naive about how the world worked at 10 or 11. The wound can heal. The raisin, golden, ripe and sweet, can be ready to serve without requiring a foot to crush her for her glory.
