There Is Something So Shameful In Trying. In Putting Forth The Effort Out In The Open Where The Onlookers

In defense of the comic, whose characters are foolish but whose mind is not. I see her brilliance in the whites of the audience’s smiles, in the wit and the quickness of her responses. I know many serious men with the mask of intelligence hiding a simple and plain nature. I find the opposite quite riveting.

-Confessions of a Ticket Sales Clerk

Eyebrows thin as wire and lips black and dotted with white latex highlights; Lottie was unmistakable.

She kept her hair short to her ears and curled like cat tails, determined to spend one of her nine lives dying fast and young. Fur cheap and puffed up over her head, she strutted down fourth avenue like fire dripped from her heels. Her eyes were naturally half shut and her neck was as thick as a wrist; she had a way of easing people into spilling all their darkest secrets to her. I was not among them. As a friend of Lottie, she switched off her siren like personality for me, to spare me I think. Maybe she felt comfortable enough to drop the act, or like I was too lowly for her to bother dawning a mask for. Either way she got me into the best dinner spots and didn’t let me spend a dime on anything. I had to appreciate her for that.

-a Friend of Lottie’s

I thought if I could redeem something in him I could redeem something in me, too. But I failed us both. He is not a project, and I cannot be healed vicariously. The only path we can take here, is forward.

With glass in our soles, tearing us apart and revealing us at the same time. Forward.

Am I denying myself happiness because I do not deserve it? Or because I am afraid that if I do, it will end anyways.

I was his worry stone.

he couldn’t pick my face out of a crowd,

Or name a single interest of mine;

he couldn’t bother to wash his mug in the sink,

Or put the coffee on in the first place;

he couldn’t braid my hair while he spoke,

Or untangle the nest he made.

All he could do was rub his hands together,

And wonder where I’d gone,

after eroding me away.

Oh, I was happy. I was so happy, until I looked down at my reflection and saw I wasn’t me at all.

I want so badly to be great but I don’t know how.

Her cupids bow dips to her bottom lip, drawn constantly, words seldom loosed. I tease laughter from her with my foolishness, and every time her mouth opens another of love’s arrows is fired at me, and if I am a soldier, I am one who so longs to be struck down, I am one who would never raise a shield against her.

—Diary of a Siren

I often love men I know I have no future with. I build castles in the sand near rising tides, and I watch lovingly as they are eroded away by reality. I don’t know why I make things that don’t last. I’m afraid to have something that matters to me I think, that could hurt me more than I want it to.

Indecision, my worst enemy, my bedfellow, my self. I look in the mirror and am met with a series of incomplete paths, loose ends, commitments unfinished. I am torn each way and no way, my spirit has been drawn and quartered. I watch my friends walk the straight and narrow line. I envy their distance, as I sit in the stagnant waters that grow higher and higher. Instead of standing up and walking away from it all, I tread water. You can always stay in the same place, contemplate the same questions, mull over the same potential paths, but the comfort the old routine brings you will fade away. That is one certainty I hold in my bundle of uncertainties. This life I live will get worse.