Meg Sefton's Blog, page 77

Wild Tales: In Defiance of Sense

Image from page 18 of “East of the sun and west of the moon : old tales from the North” (1922) Authors: Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen, 1812-1885 Moe, Jørgen Engebretsen, 1813-1882 Dasent, George Webbe, Sir, 1817-1896 Nielsen, Kay Rasmus, 1886-1957

 

Divorce, cancer, bipolar, single parenthood, failed dating relationships: All of these mishaps and more have become a part of my midlife experience. Fear for my life, feelings I do not fit into religiously conservative circles, the occasional pain of being “different,” concern for my child, an acknowledgment I may not find the next special someone, a realization my romanticism and sometimes my perfectionism rule out a “modern” relationship in which texts serve for conversation, people can be swiped away by a finger running across a digital screen, and porn has dictated that women look twenty five and behave as objects: I have been touched by all of these things and sometimes they have ruled over my ability, once sharpened by more frequent use, in letting go and forgetting troubles.

On a lonely night the other night, suffering still from a failed relationship – Was it me or was it him? Who knows. What a bother, what a pain. I will never do this again. etc. – I turned to Libri Vox, a recent discovery. I have not been one to turn to this way of imbibing my literature but I have recently discovered the beauty of having a portable narrator spin me a yarn while I lie on my bed. My narrator, I have discovered, is good for a walk with the dog, a car ride across town, the grocery store, a dish cleaning session in the kitchen, and more. If I release myself to the voice, I don’t feel as lonely. In fact, I sometimes find myself to be quite thrilled by it. Here is a volunteer, somewhere from around the world, doing their level best to put the literature of the world out there for listeners to enjoy. The experience feels personal and immediate and sometimes, just the thing.

Recently, I started listening to fairy tales, and the other night when I was suffering I began The Blue Book.

I have always been a person driven to extract meaning from texts or to gravitate texts whose purposes are didactic or could be construed as such, somehow, with the right manipulator, you know, someone like me. Yet in listening to what I sense are many of the “untamed” fairy tales – those who have not been given an obvious “lesson” – I am completely charmed. These speak back to someone like me with my heavy hand, my heavy pencil who is just dying to construct an analysis. They speak back to me and tell me to be quiet. They speak back to me and tell me to let them stand on their own. Though fairy tales, at the time of their development, may have used a number of conventions, to my modern ear, these stories seem to insist on their freedom from convention. Like a person who is not bound to convention, bound to explain themselves at every turn, worry about the impression they make, a fairy tale often seems to live in complete freedom.

I like to imagine that I, an ordinary woman, have something to share with the women who, over the centuries, created these stories together as, over time, they told these over fires and in the midst of chores, when they were resting. I like to imagine these stories, begun in the minds of women while they were about their repetitive labor, were told to others and the work of the storytellers’ imagination was supplemented by the imagination of her sisters when they retold the stories to others – their families, other women, their children. Over time, the inventing and sharing created stories smooth as pebbles or rough hewn but originating from the same rock.

I like to imagine these wild tales connect me to those who invented them in that though we now have more luxuries and in many ways, a different worldview, we are in search of the wild beyond the hard work and the worries, the will to survive. We seek rest and invention, re-invention and creativity and beauty. Of course this goes for men as well as women but there is a homespun quality, a stark quality that speaks of a woman’s voice in many of the tales. Some have been recast by male writers who have collected them and written them down. Some have a more embellished voice. Some have been stripped of racier elements, harsher elements. Some have an appended lesson. Some seem overly romantic versions of their grittier sisters. I sense in the realism and absurdism of the wilder tales a woman’s voice of what it means to be a woman in a man’s world and how one must resolve to be resilient, resourceful, wise, cunning, full of spirit.

I like to think I might understand, finally, something about fairy tales because on the eve of my forty eighth birthday I think I finally understand the value of wildness, individuality, a free spirit. It is in the story of Job confronting God in all of his sufferings and God providing no direct answer, no direct reason, only a catalogue of his wonders. God, an unpredictably free spirit and vast, full of love and mystery. It is like that, she said (Me, speaking to you, of God, of suffering, of that which we cannot predict or control, of the wildness of spirit embodied in the most unpredictable of tales, and at last, all of our own divergent tales and voices.) A person who is 48, 49, 60, 35, 18, 70 or whatever age who has encountered a wild wood in their experience, a menacing troll, an embittered stepmother, a greedy lover, a witch, an empty misleading temptation has encountered the tale of their lives. Most of us have encountered quite a few of these and more.

When I was a girl, my family went on “Toad’s Wild Ride” at Disney and from that time on, the memory of it was invoked to describe any particularly wild driving experience or traveling experience or anything unpredictable at all. To me, this is the essence of a fairy tale: A wild ride. We have television shows in the modern world which serve as the evening fires and narrators both but they are dim reflections of the tales of our ancestors who faced life in the teeth. When we can let go of our demand for logical sequences, we can more fully face life as it really is, ripping away the scrim that protects us from realities. When we let go of our demand for logical sequences, we can more fully enter a dream state, we can be taken, captured, enchanted, relieved for a moment of our defenses and need for control.

I felt lonely one night and so I turned to The Blue Book on Libri Vox and I allowed someone I didn’t know to tell me a story. I tried receiving it as a child and thought I did not accomplish this perfectly as my mind drifted back to my worries or I began to “not see the point.” I began to realize I wasn’t “doing it right.” There is a way to relate to that which is wild and unpredictable. It is allow yourself to be unpredictable too. Stop making so much sense. I wonder if there is freedom in that.

 

 

 

Early 1900s snapshot of coffin and casket, Bat Country Bo...

Early 1900s snapshot of coffin and casket, Bat Country Books, LLC flickr

“The Body” at Bizarro Central

lost container

Black and White Portrait of a Friend by Mirko Chessari, flickr

 

My inability is a lost container I cannot find in my house.

My love is a plant in a basket I abandoned in the flower bed. Though the basket rots and I do not water it anymore, the plant lives on, fading in the sun, spreading, blooming.

My uncertainty is a walking stick. I do not know for certain if I will live, or, if living, for how long. A stick is more reliable than a person. People fly away when they want to, even when you might die. And a stick can defend, even as people are shutting their windows, going to bed for the night.

My eyes are what are left after I have seen everything. I see lies coming at me now, aiming for the kill. I avert my gaze, in hopes they miss.

My hand is what grips this pen as I write. It is even better than a stick or a sword and frees the weave of my heart. At some point, every friend is an enemy, but even under threat of death, a pen is more loyal to the heart.

2015 Flash-Nano

Please see my new site created for this month’s Flash-Nano, hosted by Nancy Stohlman:  30 tales of unease

John King hosts a craft discussion of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own with Vanessa Blakeslee on his podcast The Drunken Odyssey

Olga Perdiguero Garcia   “A More Comfortable Room”  (flickr)

John King and Vanessa Blakeslee have a craft discussion of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Friederikh Gorenshtein’s “Bag-in-Hand” in The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing, ed by Victor Erofeyev

Evan Travers, Climb Every Mountain, flickr

“Have you ever watched the sunrise? Not over luxurious tropical greenery which knows all about the sun, which lives for the sun and anticipates its appearance with academic certitude. And not over a calm, grassy forest meadow, which is itself a particle of sunlight, which believes in the sun and experiences its rising as the most intimate of feelings. We had in mind sunrise over the lifeless rocky cliffs of the north. What good, you might ask, is life to the dead? What would the cold rocks want with the sun? The rocks lie there calmly, ponderously, monotonously in the depths of night, remote under their covering of ice and snow; the rocks greet the grey light of the brief day with indifference, their breasts insensitive to the keen blasts of the wind. But still the sun rises over them. A feeble imitation of the torrid, fructifying sun or gently caressing sun we know, a sun which would strike fear and anguish into the subtropical foliage or the forest glade. And suddenly the cliffs change. The rocks become pink, moss and lichen appear, and a rather unprepossessing insect crawls out of a cleft in to join in the brief holiday. Perhaps it is not even aware of where the light has come from, or why the wind has died down, or why its indifference to the cold has been replaced by a new feeling, or rather, sensation, of warmth and calm. But if the southern sun, or even the mild temperate sun, were to rise over the northern cliffs, it would mean disaster. The cold rocks would crack, the lichen would dry out, and the unprepossessing insect would die. The cold north needs a cold sun.”

The Woman of the Wood, The Kingdom of Bluebeard

Note to the reader: These are ideas for a larger story. All of the installments for this series I hope will one day form something larger and overarching. In the meantime, I am indulging in the immediately gratifying habit of creative exhibitionism. Comments and questions are welcome and encouraged.

I stopped to collect myself among the poplars, I stopped to find peace within for the journey, for a self divided and frightened was no defense against the spirits seeking empty places, holes within a soul riven with anxiety. The woman of the stick house said in our country, newly blackened by evil, I would encounter spirits of all forms, life forms animated by hungry senas who would seek to impair me on my journey for I had something they lacked: breath.

Among the fresh sprinkling of snow I spied a woman, unclothed and beautiful. She was crying, wailing out for her lover. “Who are you?” I asked her, approaching, thinking I was protected by the amulet and blessing given me by the woman of the stick house. “How is it that you are unclothed? Why are you here?”

“My bridegroom, my husband, he was displeased.”

“And so you are in the snow, naked, unclothed and alone? There are wolves.”

“I did not please him. He put me outside.”

“Yet you are beautiful.”

And as soon as these words left my lips, other women drifted from the trees as if they were the trees or a part of their smooth white bark. All of them were crying, and yet I found their sound not harsh or unpleasant, just a sound like bells ringing at once on a clear cold winter, each had their own tone but were in harmony with each other.

“We have all displeased him,” they said together, with one voice. “He touched us, he took what he wanted, and now we are without love or prospects.”

Women of flesh would not be able to survive such conditions. I made to steel myself from them lest I be overcome with pity. They should be redeemed but now would not be the time. If I allowed it, they would undo me with weeping and take away the courage I must have to escape to escape to higher country.

They surrounded me.

“Can we not drink from your amulet?”

They were not unlike my mothers and sisters and had been trusting once, and yet they had not learned to be wise. A soul that has acted against its own behalf has the force of anger doubled back. The feet of these women burned through the ground as they walked, as they approached they grimaced and their teeth appeared as the coyotes which roamed the upper region.

“I respect your plight, but I should be on my way,” I said, careful not to let on that I saw the whole of their bodies burning through the earth and the true nature of what lay behind their beauty – the pain, anguish, and wildness of grief. That they should be loosed upon the land by the same man whose reign would remain unchecked unless another man sought to oppose him stole my heart but I could not stop. Instead I built a fire in the middle of the woods. I loaded a pile of dry wood quickly before the snow settled in and began a spark with my flint.

I could feel their hands on my back, my hair, my face, as I attempted to make something good for them, to help in some way. They were irrepressible in their need and yet I understood them just as much as they frightened me.

“I am you,” I said. “When one of us is free, it will be the as if it has happened for each of us. You must let me go now so we may return to the goodness that we knew in the kingdom before this darkness fell. Keep this light going as a promise. I want to look wherever I am and see evidence you are here, keeping alive the hope that all will not be as it is now.”

They did not let me go, so deep was their hunger, but I managed to be away using as a torch a burning branch, senas instinctively recoiling from flame though it would do nothing, in actuality, to harm their ethereal forms.

The Kingdom of Bluebeard

 

I must away from him on the high road, from his jaws and greedy eyes, what I have undertaken to see and point out. My sisters call to me from the plains and their cries are plaintive, knowing, wise. I must away from him before he beats me for taking the bleeding key, the blood of women slain behind his door. “Never say this,” he has said. “Never do that.” “Do not wear…” “Do not ask me….” “Do not make…” “You are worthless in your passions.” Shreds of me are falling off among the fields, my feet are fleet, my heart beats fast within my breast. I will run before I am taken.

On the road I meet a woman before a shack. She says “Come in my child for the highway after dark is no place for a flesh and bone woman.” She took me into her twig abode saying women sometimes build their own houses with all the strength they have to lift and tie, but there were some who knew what rocks to place before the doorways, the open places. A ring of stones surrounded her bleached cottage, pitiful looking against the wind. “No spirit will enter,” she said and dipped a ladle into a pot of soup swaying over a fire.

The liquid made my tongue to dance in my mouth and I said: “I have not spoken for a long time. I have been mute.”

She scooped up a clod of wet earth from her floor and placed it on my forehead, trails of mud dripping down my cheeks. “You have been stone. I will make you clay.”

She formed my head, my neck, my chest, my arms, my hands, my abdomen, my hips, my pevis, my rear, my legs, my feet. She set me before the fire and had me warm. She covered me with water and put breath in my nose and what had been before became almost like a dream. And she took me out beside the largest stone before her doorway, where we were guarded, lifting her craggy hand to the sky. “I will make it as if you have not been ruled by the hours. I return to you the time.” And the sky became as if full of diamonds and I remembered my mother sending me out to my groomsman, hopeful yet worried, and my sisters, crying. “Your kin wait in dull place,” she said, knowing my thoughts. “I will unstop your mouth and you will have the courage to speak to them about this thing that has passed before your eyes and in your heart and body but which rule over you no more.”

She gave me a new cloak. How she could afford it I was not sure. She seemed to be literally of earth. It was gilded and long and fur lined. She spit in my mouth and it was like honey. She embossed my face with the tints of bark and my beauty was returned to me, long after the cycles of rapacious furry and inexplicable neglect. She encased my head in her hands and I remembered soft things like petals and dreams of babies and my mother’s cool arm.

Away again on the road in the morning light, an amulet of fire against my breast, a dagger tucked beneath my cloak to ward off minions who would seek to infect me, to have me believe I am nothing but flesh to be consumed as if there was no other purpose but for another’s passing whim. I was remade in the night, old dreams wracking my body as the woman burned bay leaf branches over my breast. I was no longer who I was, ever, I was some former version though not completely. I knew now how to fight and whom. “Your mother and sisters have never known these things,” said the woman, “you must  teach them,” she said, dipping  the dagger in poison. “You must  protect your dreams and they theirs. There is no one else to act anymore on a woman’s behalf. It is coming, a dark epoch, the evil that prevails except in places it is not allowed breath.”

Beyond the plains lie the mountains  where my mother and sisters live in the castle of my good father, but he grows old and weak and feeble-minded. Our task lie immense before us not the least of which defeating the spirits which rise up from the plain and take residence in the heart, they have no where to go and no special aim, their presence is as when wind is sucked into the caverns. They will take up residence in the feeble and those improperly girded, the empty and aimless. They nip at me as the roiling sky bites at my back, the gold of my cape deflecting the penetrating darkness.

I must away from him on the high road, from his jaws and greedy eyes, what I have undertaken to see and point out. My sisters call to me from the plains and their cries are plaintive, knowing, wise. I must away from him before he beats me for taking the bleeding key, the blood of women slain behind his door. “Never say this,” he has said. “Never do that.” “Do not wear…” “Do not ask me….” “Do not make…” “You are worthless in your passions.” Shreds of me are falling off among the fields, my feet are fleet, my heart beats fast within my breast. I will run before I am taken.

On the road I meet a woman before a shack. She says “Come in my child for the highway after dark is no place for a flesh and bone woman.” She took me into her twig abode saying women sometimes build their own houses with all the strength they have to lift and tie, but there were some who knew what rocks to place before the doorways, the open places. A ring of stones surrounded her bleached cottage, pitiful looking against the wind. “No spirit will enter,” she said and dipped a ladle into a pot of soup swaying over a fire.

The liquid made my tongue to dance in my mouth and I said: “I have not spoken for a long time. I have been mute.”

She scooped up a clod of wet earth from her floor and placed it on my forehead, trails of mud dripping down my cheeks. “You have been stone. I will make you clay.”

She formed my head, my neck, my chest, my arms, my hands, my abdomen, my hips, my pevis, my rear, my legs, my feet. She set me before the fire and had me warm. She covered me with water and put breath in my nose and what had been before became almost like a dream. And she took me out beside the largest stone before her doorway, where we were guarded, lifting her craggy hand to the sky. “I will make it as if you have not been ruled by the hours. I return to you the time.” And the sky became as if full of diamonds and I remembered my mother sending me out to my groomsman, hopeful yet worried, and my sisters, crying. “Your kin wait in dull place,” she said, knowing my thoughts. “I will unstop your mouth and you will have the courage to speak to them about this thing that has passed before your eyes and in your heart and body but which rule over you no more.”

She gave me a new cloak. How she could afford it I was not sure. She seemed to be literally of earth. It was gilded and long and fur lined. She spit in my mouth and it was like honey. She embossed my face with the tints of bark and my beauty was returned to me, long after the cycles of rapacious furry and inexplicable neglect. She encased my head in her hands and I remembered soft things like petals and dreams of babies and my mother’s cool arm.

Away again on the road in the morning light, an amulet of fire against my breast, a dagger tucked beneath my cloak to ward off minions who would seek to infect me, to have me believe I am nothing but flesh to be consumed as if there was no other purpose but for another’s passing whim. I was remade in the night, old dreams wracking my body as the woman burned bay leaf branches over my breast. I was no longer who I was, ever, I was some former version though not completely. I knew now how to fight and whom. “Your mother and sisters have never known these things,” said the woman, “you must  teach them,” she said, dipping  the dagger in poison. “You must  protect your dreams and they theirs. There is no one else to act anymore on a woman’s behalf. It is coming, a dark epoch, the evil that prevails except in places it is not allowed breath.”

Beyond the plains lie the mountains  where my mother and sisters live in the castle of my good father, but he grows old and weak and feeble-minded. Our task lie immense before us not the least of which defeating the spirits which rise up from the plain and take residence in the heart, they have no where to go and no special aim, their presence is as when wind is sucked into the caverns. They will take up residence in the feeble and those improperly girded, the empty and aimless. They nip at me as the roiling sky bites at my back, the gold of my cape deflecting the penetrating darkness.

all true

 

I haven’t dreamt in a long time, I haven’t slept well in months. This afternoon, an inspiration came over me to slip into my purple grey room and tuck myself under the soft white comforter borrowed from my son’s room while he hikes the Blue Ridge.  It has been so long since I’ve dreamed, I’ve been in mourning for it. Grief, anxiety, the chemical pall of chemo and medications, the despair for things I have lost seems to have shrouded my mind, at least temporarily, taking my concentration and the release needed to let go of conscious thought.

I dreamt of a street I have driven down many times which runs through the heart of my Florida town. I am driving my SUV and a car driving slightly behind me to my right swerves into the lane of a motorcyclist. The man on the motorcycle is not hit and he doesn’t fall but when I look out of my rearview mirror, I see both the driver of the car and the cyclist have stopped and pulled over to the side of the road into the entry of a parking garage. The cyclist, his sunglasses flying off, is beating the driver through the open window of the car. My heart racing, I do a U-turn, speeding the wrong way on a one-way but otherwise deserted street, back to the scene of the violence, unsure of what I will do when I arrive. I awoke abruptly, my heart racing, relieved it was only a dream.

I haven’t dreamt for three years. I’m not sure what it means to be reintroduced to dreaming through terrifying visions, but dreams are as unpredictable as people and all must be accepted eventually.

This past spring after my son played baseball at a field close to the beach, I said good bye to him for the night. He was going with his father and stepmom to join the team for a post game dinner. They turned inland and I turned toward the coast down A1A. If I had to spend the night alone, I may as well be spending it on the beach at sunset, and in particular at a beach where my high school friend’s family owned a condo. We are no longer friends. After I married and moved to various cities with my ex, coming back into town only briefly for holidays, my friend told me if I didn’t see her more often when I was home, I could forget about our friendship. I chose to spend time with my family rather than more time with her. Now, ironically, I have lost both. Except my child still calls me his mother. And I have a sister, a mother, a father.

My friend and I used to spend the night on the balcony of her condo, listening to the waves crash on the sand.

As I am driving to the beach, an old VW van swerves into my lane, right in front of me, forcing me to slam on my brakes. The motorcycles behind me – two – slam on their brakes. Through my rearview mirror, I see, to my horror, a bike skidding along the pavement and a body flipping up through the air and landing on the shoulder of the road. I pull over to the median and put on my hazards, grabbing my jacket, running with my middle aged body, my weight jiggling from my frame, to the place where this cycling couple cry out to each other, the man in tact physically but falling apart with disbelief and panic, hovering over his wife, the woman lying face down and moaning, crying out in a way I had not heard before, blood matting her blond hair. The man turns her onto her back. I give him my white coat to protect the back of her head from the asphalt.

I never found out what happened to her. I stayed to answer questions, stayed until the ambulance took the couple away. Oddly, I took my coat back. An emergency technician put it in a bag. I would throw it away the next day. It would never come clean. I never made it to the beach, wouldn’t try again for months. My sister answered when I called her as I drove back to our town. She talked me through the ordeal of getting back to our city after I had experienced an unanticipated calamity.

A few months before this incident, my son and I went to California and I wore my white coat then. A few hours before the dream this afternoon, I posted a picture of my child and I on social media. We are smiling on the beach at Sausalito, me in my white coat I was wearing before we headed into the deep heart of Muir Woods to reach sunset on the other side.

gift

green tip kafir lilly by K M via flickr

She talked him into this, everything so new between them. She wanted to go to the beach, an easy trip for a Saturday evening, a drive to the east coast, a place of her growing up years, a place familiar. He had warned her, in their planning, of rain as predicted on the weather channel, warned her of the heat. But here is what she knew: There was a difference between the middle section of the state and the beach. She knew the rhythms, when rain was likely in summer and how long it would last, what temperatures were like by water, how beautiful sunsets were and of course she hoped they might walk and she hoped, if they did so, he might hold her hand. She saw it in her mind, but she coached herself: Let him do it. In a previous broken relationship that crushed her heart, that other man could not be counted on. This was a chance to test this new one’s feeling.

She felt a little deflated, upon their arrival at the public beach pavilion, to see a young woman with hair like a mop, each strand a worn color of a flag. She felt irritated. Why did so many people insist on calling so much attention to themselves? She went to Venice Beach to see the freaks, but now not even her childhood beach was sacred. She felt guilty because she knew this new man would not share her attitude. He was a much more generous spirit than her previous one and would not indulge the ugliness she felt inside at this moment. And it might turn him turn him away. Of course she would not show her true self, at least not at this moment.

The woman wore huge pants that ballooned outward though she was skinny, had a nice figure evident from the flat tummy between the midriff. What was going to happen? A woman like that does not show up at the beach just to hang out in the sand and watch the waves. She was there to compete with all of that. A young man was with her. But he was hardly noticeable by comparison.

As she and this new man put their shoes in a pile and blanket on the sand, the woman with the hair and the pants starting working a huge hula hoop, wrapped with strips of tattered cloth, her hips undulating in a slow, seductive gyration.

What the — ?

She couldn’t take it any more.

“Some people like to be seen,” she said.

“Oh, haven’t you been to the drum circle in town?” said this new man.

She knew of drum circles, what a lot of people did, what they looked like. She had stumbled across a huge drum circle when she was with her child and husband in Asheville, her husband now her ex and who would not have hung out among drum circles.

She felt a little pressure. Would she be expected to go to drum circles?

She had to confess, beneath all the layers of her identities that had come with each relationship, she didn’t know who she was any more.  She was a pleaser. The only time of her true chosen identity she felt was when she was a senior in college and finally free of all relationships that would bind her to a course. Her dream was to work for a nonprofit and help people with AIDS. The horizon had been ever before her in that moment, a span that lasted several months but then disappeared again under the weight of expectation.

(Perhaps this is why she sought so vehemently the horizon of the shore at the break of this new relationship, perhaps, she thinks, as she writes this. She sought it to the point of arguing her way to it even as she was concerned about making a good impression. The horizon over the ocean: an ever visible inspiration when you are standing before it. Walls are false pretenses. Water is stronger. The sky is forever.)

This new man brought with him a set of new beliefs. She felt pressure. But not too much pressure. She only felt anxious she would disappoint him as she had the men before. Maybe in a different way perhaps, but wasn’t it all the same when you could boil it down to one word? Disappointment.

They walked on. He held her hand.

What if she can’t believe what he believes? What if she can’t be as nice as he expects, as open and free? What if she can’t be open to his teaching? He seems to want to teach her things. (In fact, as she is now recalling as she writes this, all of them had.) She didn’t want to be lonely again. Her heart ached with the possibility of it but she knew, deep down, she would have to be true to herself. Was it the woman’s burden always to bend? Sometimes she had bent to the point of almost being broken: don’t write; don’t write this; you’re not political enough; you’re not intellectual enough; you’re not organized; you’re too fat; your face is round; your butt is big; you talk too much; you talk too little; I like women in dresses; I like women in heels; women should not wear pants suits; a real woman doesn’t wear her hair short; I like a woman who keeps up with her nails, sometimes the glitter art helps her express her creativity; I think your hair should be blond like it used to be when I knew you years ago; if you bought a platinum blond wig and wore a white dress you would look a lot like Marilyn Monroe; I would like to read your stories at some point (An ever receding point, she thinks as she writes this, fading off into the distance like the sun setting over the Gulf.)

No one knows you really, no. No one wants to know. They want to imagine, something. And when you show them who you are, their dream is gone and so are you.

When they return from their walk, the woman with the ragamuffin hair has taken the hair off for as it turns out it is a wig and she is sitting in the sand, in her hoop, looking slightly deflated.

She and her new man spread the blanket out. He says he has something for her he wants her to smell. He pulled something from the bag but told her to close her eyes. She did so. She hoped she would be up for it. There was fear she would not be. It was an oil he said while her eyes were closed. She knew the meaning some people attributed to oils. It smelled like a rose perfume she used to wear until she reacted to a comment that it was something for old ladies. She had thought, up until that point, it was wonderful to always don the scent of her favorite flower. She said it was rose bergamot. He said it was not. He said he didn’t know for sure but he knew that much. He said “This is intention.” Here it comes, she thought. “You breathe it in.”

She thought of something she intended. She wanted a good, long relationship with him though she never would have said that. She intended to lose weight and so she turned to him to say that but he was facing the water, eyes closed, as if in meditation. She hadn’t done the right thing. Was this what you were supposed to do when you smelled oils?

For that moment, she felt no harm in the man sitting on the blanket with her.

When he opened his eyes she spoke clumsily of her intention. She looked at the sand. She knew she was dependent. There was even a term for it, not co-dependent, but something else, a term her therapist used to describe her and her clingy woman self, though she could be other things too, she was mainly this way in relationship, dependent upon the opinion of men, particularly the man she was with.

She looked at the sand. thinking of the oil and the many things he had said already, and she thought of his look in profile as they sat there on the blanket and what she decided for that moment was this: He was good. She knew this. And that was all for now. And for now she would keep her secret belief to herself, except, dear reader, what you are reading here now. She would play along with these notions for a while because they seemed important to him and frankly, she liked him. And he seemed ready to care about her and so what he showed her was something meaningful and that in and of itself would be the gift and she would allow herself to receive it though she had no idea of what it was, only that it had been given. In and of itself, she realized, that was enough for the moment in which she found herself and it seemed to be something different from what had happened to her before and so what if she had secret unbelief? A nice man sat on a blanket with her.