In my present life, there is 3 of me. The girl with things, the girl with people, and the girl in the air.
The girl with things sits in the exact chair I type from now, creating a ruckus with innumerable charms and beads that hang from strings around her neck. The rest of her, however, is silent. She attempts to fulfill quests for meaning by way of scavenges through tangled piles of clothes and jewels in thrift store bins, scrawling sentiments to far away friends on postcards with carefully-selected quirk and deeply imprinted letterpress, and by buying the most colorful and oddly shaped vegetables at the farmer's market for meals that she'll never cook and dinner guests she'll never have.
The girl with people is excessively wordy, sympathetic, and uses intellect to compartmentalize every deeply troublesome topic of her life when catching up. There is no "the breakup was mutual," there is only time for an explanation of her progress since that fateful phone call. Her friends are very supportive of her every move, and why wouldn't they be? In the interest of time and energy, they've each been provided with a case study of every tribulation, and if they're lucky, she'll even reference a distant relationship or allow the twinkle of a brimming tear. She is the only one of the three who feels grounded and sure of her place in the world.
Girl in the air exists only for a few hours at a time, suspended in time and space between her two heavily-defined counterparts. She stares out of the airplane window and admires those strangely-passing solar systems of cities, admiring them as if they were jewels in a case, contemplating her existence and feeling smaller and less permanent than the cubes of ice in that cheap, plastic cup.
"How strange it is to be anything at all."
I still lament the fact that my disposition is light years away from ballerina grace. I will buy pale pink flats, carelessly off-the-shoulder blouses, and tie my hair up into glossy buns, but my limbs refuse to act accordingly. My body often feels like a bumbling, bulky thing pinned to my soul... an easy figure to blame for all of the broken vases at home, fixtures at work, and unfinished drinks long since steeped into my jeans. During yoga class, a task itself that seems foolish in attending each week, I am forever the eyesore. "Sun salutations" are a series of poses that, when executed correctly, are supposed to resemble and feel like the an ocean wave lapping at the shore. While the willowy backs of my peers elongate, muscles rippling underneath like tiny fish, my knees lock up and occasionally send me tumbling back to my mat with a conspicuous thump. While they extend their ankles above their heads, supported only by limber wrists, I am forced to endure the white noise of my self-defeat while I sit and touch my forehead to the ground.
In connection with this entire concept is this childhood memory that I can't seem to escape... A necklace string breaks, tiny baubles hit the ground in fives, a deliciously multiplied pitter-pat on the wooden floor, and my tiny, fleshy fingers grab at them. These beads sat in the miniscule drawer of my childhood jewelry box for years, and unless someone else has since intervened, may still be tucked away in the velvet lined cranny. It feels like the first memory I have of that panicked feeling of loss, frustration with my carelessness, and a complete inability to acknowledge the end of something.
Why do I continue to pin so much loyalty and trust into things with a terrible return rate? "The prospect of arm wrestling with my only ally in a place full of strangers was just too daunting." And thus, the fucked up dreams commence.
