Thursday, February 27, 2014

A Ballad For Mrs. Lovett


"Mrs. Lovett, you're a bloody wonder, eminently practical and yet appropriate as always."  

This is my final headache.  
I was not born to dote, not born to breathe for you.  
I had other opportunities, other loves.  

Other heartaches.

I get my own dinner, I clean my own space.  I take care of the dog, and I pay my rent.  I file taxes every year.  I hardly drive above the speed limit.  I have stamps.

Stamps.

An ordinary life for an extraordinary faith.  Faith that he will love.  Faith that he will forget.  
Faith for first choice.

I want to remember and to be remembered.  I am selfish, I am hasty, I am ignorant.  Praying to be better, and sleeping in until noon.  Hoping for blue skies, and wearing all black.  Contradictory to beauty, yet standing for just that.

He loved very little and I loved to pretend I was part of it.  




"How I've lived without you all these years, I'll never know."



Friday, February 7, 2014

Happily Ever After









I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because my whole life I've bombarded my mind with images of princes and princesses and divine intervention and Meg Ryan seeing Tom Hanks at the top of the Empire State Building and all those gloriously inglorious musings of regular people at long tables.

They are people who don't realize what they do.  They don't know that somewhere some 12 year old girl will see their story on television and think that her future husband will run to her in an airport and tell her that he was wrong, he does want three kids and a dog and a small house in Vienna.  And he doesn't care about her insensibilities and her selfish desire to spend all day in bed with morning breath.  He doesn't want someone skinny and white, he wants the patchy yellow skinned, bent nose, chubby thighed mistake that she is.  He wants her mood swings and her high pitched chipmunk impersonations.  Her messy desk and her terrible cooking.  

No, I think I have it all figured out.  He won't see me at a party and fall in love with me from across the room, he will instead fail to notice me as I make up the rest of our lives together.  Because we are not strings being sewn into masterpieces for the gods, we are merely just wandering around and waiting for our number to be called.  And we can wait, or we can leave.  But no one will do it for you.  

Well, I'd rather be a part of something much more selfish.
Because I am abnormal and also unwanted.

So here's to John Cusack's boom box and Ducky at the prom.  Here's to Molly Ringwald's red hair, and that scene at the end where they meet each other on the ice and just know.  To the leading ladies and to their less attractive best friends, who usually end up having sex with the creepy guy.  Here's to immaculate commitment.  Here's to the end.

All I used to think about was the day he'd sweep me off my feet.  But now I'm just hoping he doesn't hit.