mainsqueeze's Diaryland Diary

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let me be

I smelled it in the produce section, nobody else in sight, no women nearby to possibly name as its source. Am I crazy? Am I going crazy, that I would walk into a cloud of familiar perfume strong enough to make my eyes close and then when I realize what I'm smelling, it's gone? October, man. Fucking October. Let me be crazy this month.
Next month brings a trip to Michigan where I will draw a map of my new life, where I want to live and where I want to work and who I want to become once I get there. You want my secret, now? I don't even want to go. I don't want to, but I will, because I have spent twenty-three years doing exactly what I wanted to and look where I am. Look where what I wanted has gotten me.
I helped two little kids, a boy and a girl, cross the street the other day. I passed them and saw them hesitate, step into the road, and leap back onto the sidewalk five times when inconsiderate drivers sped past. I told them I would be their crossing guard. After they were safely across the road, the little girl looked at me and said, "Thank you, lady." I'm always surprised when kids address me like an adult-- I still feel like a child in so many ways that I forget that my body is a woman's body. I am a miss, a ma'am, a lady. Did I miss an intergral rite of passage, one that would serve to make a little girl believe that she was a woman?
I've been thinking of something that I'm not proud of, lately, a memory of late 2005, and in this memory my sister, eyes screwed nearly shut and streaming with tears, reaches for my shoulder as I sit in my own sad little bubble and furious like a cat hissing and showing its teeth I tell her to leave me alone, I don't want to be touched right now. That is what I do when I hurt, I bare my teeth and tell the world to fuck off and let me soak in my sorrow, fuck off and leave me be. As a result of last year I have developed an unusual aversion to tears-- they make me nauseous and when I see them I have to fight the urge to run, recalling my Grandmother sobbing with her dentures out and full of Valium, her eye makeup gathered in the corners of her eyes screaming "IT ISN'T MY FAULT" or my Mother's face slick and slimy looking with tears, her hands reaching out for me, to kiss me and tell me how lucky she feels to have a daughter like me, those fucking tears soaking through my shirt and onto my shoulder... It makes me feel sick to my stomach, and angry-- how dare anyone be weak enough to cry? How fucking dare they?

7:09 p.m. - 2006-10-19

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