I M Perfect lady

Tag: Sickened

  • Caught

    One last section from ‘Sickened’…by Julie Gregory.

     

    Spring thaws the farmhouse, and in front of the mirrors, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tigerlike stretch marks on their sides from a burst of growth.  My hipbones expand like a time-lapsed flower in bloom.  I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from the tight shell.  I use my fingertips to tug and pull laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I’ve been kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked atrophied limbs out of its hold.

     

    I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours.  I need to see what my face says.  What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.

     

    Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty.  I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body.  Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself.  My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangled and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.

     

    I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs of my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin.  I study tiny blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on its own; an affirmation that I am living.  I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.

     

    I look at every part of myself through the mirror, wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see.  My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror mesmerized.  I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body lean and lithe.  I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.

     

    My mind is imprinted with images of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: That I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early.  My mind’s eye sees me as a stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse’s long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes.  Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.

     

    So I step back to the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees.  I reach my fingers out to feel her face.  My eyes cannot get over it.  They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back?  Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are completely opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass.  It will take me three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together.

                    Julie Gregory

     

    My mother had a magical mirror and words would allow her world to remain perfect, sins could be erased with the magical phrase, and it would erase all blemishes that may other wise appear, returning him always to be whiter than snow.

     

    It is horrifying and shocking to see the damage he was able to do, while she continued to stare dreamily into her cracked mirror of dreams.

     

    Behind the wall, lay many broken little girls whose wounds could not be erased so easily.

     

    There are no simple phrases that will return your world upright, restore trust and love and give you back faith.

     

    When we are taught that words can erase deeds, we are left in twisted place in our minds.

     

    In our minds a mirror appears that switches things around, but in reality nothing changes.  Nothing.

     

    It feels like the magic mirror was the release hatch my father needed, the escape door…. Her words allowed him to change magically into a kind man, always.

     

    Her catch and release program allowed another little girl to be caught.

     

     

  • Sickened

    Here is another few lines from “Sickened” by Julie Gregory.

     

    “I lived my life in a bubble. First it was her bubble. Then it was of my own making.  And now, freshly stripped of the delusion that had protectively swathed me for years, I was embryonic – too raw to interface directly with the world.  People aren’t just influential to me; a thin layer of them fuses onto me like hot cling wrap.  Their words become my words, their voice inflections merge seamlessly into my own, their opinions form a transparency over the faint etchings of my own developing ones.

     

    I look back through stacks of photographs of me after the fire.  In each picture, I hold the facial tics and expressions of whoever I am involved with at the time. My face adopts the characteristics of the other, their fine lines, the exact way the jaw muscles freeze or the flex within their smile. My face morphs to take on their identity.

     

    Then I look at a baby picture of myself at six months old, lying on my belly, a natural smile lightening up my face.  My own natural smile, unbroken, intact.  This is the only picture I have of my own face, not someone else’s.  I wonder am I destined to drag around the past like a discarded placenta?  I wonder how far do I boil back in order to reclaim my self?  I was how many pieces did I lose along the way?  Where do I find them? Can I put them back? How many times do you glue a broken vase before you toss it?

     

    I had been taken to the bone.  My mother had fingered into me like the hollow of a melon and scooped me out.  And now, years later, you could press belly to backbone.

     

    Books are my friends, where it’s okay to be silent….

     

    All my time is spent slipped silently between their pages, finding some truth to go with the mirrors. They are self-help gurus who parent me positively and show me how to believe in myself.  They suggest underlying spiritual philosophies:  That each soul chooses its parents and all its experiences in order to learn the lessons it needs to develop fully.  That if the soul’s human form knew what it was supposed to learn beforehand, the ego would short-circuit the process of discovery.  They tell me that, because of this double blind experiment, where you find yourself in this painful process is exactly where you need to be.

     

    That if you lived in a dark cave you’d need time to adjust to the light when the rock was rolled away.

     

    That Hawaii had to be a volcanic eruption of toxic goo and ash before it became so lush and beautiful.

     

    That if you watched the clothes in a washer, it would look like they’re getting dirtier as they slosh through filthy water.  But it’s only after this agitation cycle that you can pull out fresh, clean clothes.

     

    I bolster myself with platitudes: “We are who we are not despite adversity, but because of it” and “They say the truth hurts, but the only thing truth hurts, are illusions.” I sink the studs into soft dirt, and bank my new foundation.

     

    My books talk to me like the child I am and coax me into developing autonomously.  They metaphorically hang all the colored pictures I make on the fridge when I race home with them.  They never tell me: Lighten up, you think too much.  If anything, they say, Hey, you, with the frontal lobe, turn off the TV, stop the noise, and consider this deeply.  They never dismiss me with Get over it.  Or if I turn to my father: What are you talking about? My brother: I don’t remember anything. Or my mother when I squeak out that I was too young to be taking the gun out of her mouth: “Jesus Julie, where is a mother supposed to turn to for support if not to her own daughter?  You think the sun rises and sets on you, like you don’t have any problems?  I can think of a hundred times you…”

     

    I pile my books around me before I sleep and they are the psychic guardrails that keep me from falling out of bed at night.”   Julie Gregory