I am 39 going on 17. Time is irrelevant to me, except for when it matters to other people. I am terrified of intimacy, when the quivering, pink heart is bared under harsh lights and shimmers hesitantly, like nacre. I am very fond of the word ‘truculent.’ This autoportrait is a way for me to come to terms with my relative irrelevancy. My favorite hour of the day is around seven in the evening, which is a pleasant hour just after dinner. I have no favorite tastes, except for spicy, but not too spicy, as it will upset my stomach and cause acid to flux up my esophagus and stain the back of my mouth with its causticity. When I was very young, I saw a dragonfly the size of a dog, hovering in the space between the swings on the swing-set. When the sun came out from behind the clouds, it was gone. It is possible that I dreamed this. I fall in love very easily, and heedlessly, despite counseling myself to be more circumspect. It is possible that I am mis-using the word ‘love’ in the previous sentence. I am drawn to masculinity in a different way than I am from femininity—it is a hunger as opposed to an awe. I am drawn to the surreal, but in the way that I imagine a fake etymology for the word (from the French) sûr real, which would mean “below” the real, in that the sûr real is what lives below the real, what comes bubbling up when there are cracks in the perceivable, in the logical. I also believe in the unreal, which is the opposite of the real, the mirror image of the real, the intangible, what lives behind (or inside of ) plate glass. My husband screams whenever he pees, which unsettles me, but apparently it’s because he has trouble passing water. I have told him this, but he tells me that it is involuntary, as involuntary as it is when I jerk in fright whenever he emits this noise from within the bathroom’s echoic cloister. I do not have any pets, though I have often fantasized about owning a cat and a dog, or a cat or a dog. I do not imagine that they would get along if I had one of each, though I would like it if they did. I imagine that the cat would curl up in a high place, tail wrapped around its gray body, while the dog napped in front of the recliner where I, too, was napping, having fallen asleep reading something out of Poe, or perhaps Hawthorne, or some other dusty classical purveyor of the Odd. I like to read, but what I love to read is the author who uses words in a new way, creates a new dance with them, as opposed to the same old meretricious waltz—give me a rhumba or a lambada, or a breakdance. The best writing is unpretentious and frank, which is why I do not value my own work as much as I could, since I am too aware of myself as the person who develops the seating chart for the words in the classroom of the paragraph. I am unconsciously drawn to order, but desire chaos in intermittent spells, like a hurricane that will come and wash everything away so that I can begin making mistakes anew. I am often convinced that I was born in the wrong time, but when I consider actually living in another time, the perils and discomforts of those ages seem repulsive, and then I am forced to reconsider the reality of the age in which I am currently alive. I have hidden secret messages between each of the sentences in this post. They nestle in between the full stop and the capital letter of the next phrase like little voles, anxiously digging down into the substrate under the text. Through these holes plumes the stale air of the surreal. I do not claim to be the author of those exhumations, and I am considering whether or not they disturb me.
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