musings at breakfast September 2010 |
These girls do not appear to feel the numbing, perpetual, existential boredom I fight with. Restless and wanting, I inhale to push back the weight of my own contrition. Can this sustain them? Banal chatter about others and each other, details of a trivial wasteland. Can they glide through this world, afloat? Are they kept above balance by their beauty, by their effortless glee? They have charmed their way through all so far, those sparkling pearly whites and clear eyes, untainted by the dark underbelly that I find so enticing. They are not bound by the same constraints of bitterness and criticism that hound the likes of me. The epitome of optimism, is it blind? Is it fair to accuse them of ignorance, when my only superior knowledge is the green tint these lashes lend me? Have I ever been so undercover, have I ever fooled myself that I once was one of them? Did I believe my own tale of a fall from grace so tragic, the Greeks would have wept? Narcissism that would inspire Cicero himself to tell all, the great orator on his knees! Are they harpies? Are they ghouls? Does my own many-layered conscience deceive me also, could they really comply to my wishful damnation? Heavens no! These nymphets have never seen (dare to think!) The kind of evil I pin on their collective breast. Have they never found themselves at the end of the line? Never crushed by the expectations of others and themselves they cannot possibly fulfill? Has the speeding train of crystallization never hit them, never wounded into their foreheads the great chasm between the individual and the rest of the world? Oh, to be young and be free! Oh, to be one of these peachy dolls, with the canvas so clean and so bright! These virgin minds, these virgin wombs, lending to each one of us a delightful smear of their purity, daily. A sweet slap in the face to any one of us who’s ever tried to reinvent; foiled by our own selves waiting in the wings. If this is The Ultimate, the perfection we seek, we have already deformed ourselves, desecrated that which may have kept us holy. If this is The Virginity the poets burst into rapture for, The Venus, then what are we? We who dwell in the depths of depravity, smirking and sinning below deck, our under-the-counter culture and viciously sterilized selves. We are chlorinated in the most potent of forms, we are corroded and asphalt and greasy and dun, we can slide into our horrendous trends. We are, after all, accessory to these creatures, half-heartedly drawling the chorus line, sucking on the exhausts, buying identical underwear, seeping into the sheets... |