Self-Misunderstandings

Speed Self-Portrait, 2012

Her face was a fist. It struck the gut of every stranger.

The tangled nest of her mind was a puzzle with no solution. Like a multi-tiered maze, it was paradoxical and led only in knots that frustrated any conversant. Combing it was as confounding as running fingers through wet, matted hair.

There were no outlets.

She ripped thoughts away from tangibility as though they were pages in a book. Chapters and chapters of unhappy endings tore to pieces, without even the satisfaction of the sound of tearing, or the clunk as they made their imaginary landings on the floors, the walls, the counter tops.

She was a mish-mash girl, invisible and strikingly obvious at the same time. She was always going in the wrong direction.

If time is a wire, supporting pin-ups of events like laundry in the minds of humans, she is certainly a spiral. She was a side-ways force no one can keep in the safety of boxes or definitions. Her thoughts and daydreams came and went as they pleased.

Ideas were tourists. They luxuriated on the chairs and divans in her hotel eyes, paid their fare, and made clean getaways through the highways of her lungs and the alleyways of her nostrils. Her breath came loudly, announcing their departure.

Her eyes warped from their darkness into a coffee stain. Her concentrated look was a spill, the liquid curved down at the edges of her mouth. Her face dripped its caffeine tears. She folded her smallness in half and hunched over the paper that was as crisp as her voice.

The miasmic world dissolved like sugar around her.

She picked her words from the piles among her feet, testing them, weighing them, and then setting them in order from lightest to heaviest on her page. It felt good to end her sentences with the force of an anvil.

With one heavy boulder of a line, whose scribbled face was as black as a burn, she concluded her constructions.

She weighted the edges so the whole epistle crumbled toward the bottom. The ink spots edged together like a crowd. Crumpled and used, the frailness of the elderly, yellow paper announced itself in her hands. Edge met edge.

Soft as a strand of hair, the beginnings sniffed at the stone ends. There was a crease, a folding of ideas as she smashed the lined poem together. It reached down and touched its toes, then carefully brought its arms together. Quartered, the weight entered her pocket, loving her hip the way no man would ever. It snuggled in warm as fingers.

The sun didn’t notice, and dripped down the already stained face of the sky.