Saturday nights wear so many faces, in the blur of years they have become unrecognizable.
Saturday night was once a sea of alcohol, tribute to the porcelain gods.
Saturday night was once another cold night in the street.
Saturday night was once pharmaceutical roulette.
Saturday night was, not often but a few moments in memory, a movie and all the dinner we could afford, crumpled bills and clenched fists.
Saturday night, for a long time, was study, the other students out drinking while little ms. workaholic took the time off from study groups to do another ten thousand math equations.
Saturday night in Lyon was a drunken warble, crooked but dancing still, filled with off-key voices of affectionate rugbymen.
Here, Saturday nights have been quiet movie nights, dinners, chemical escapades and a myriad of coloured dragons, and yet this last Saturday night carried a different sort of significance.
Last Saturday night, I clenched my fists against Mr. Pyke's chest and the tears came without warning, all the helplessness, uncertainty, all the big questions and their feeble answers, all the Great Dreams that I have been carried on my sore wings, they fled silently, then loudly, then silently again onto striped sheets.
Once upon a lifetime I was the mushroom girl, each Saturday a new epiphany, a new colour with which to define the infinite reaches (rather than limits) of my skies.
In another lifetime, between now and then, I was the anxiety attack, every three weeks my hair on end and the unsuspecting masses caught in the path of my projectiles.
That lifetime had me terrified of becoming my father.
In this lifetime, I spend my days shaking with a different anxiety, an enthusiastic nervousness, a productive tension.
Sounds nutty, I know, and you're right, but Saturday morning while I waited for the sunrise, sleep so far away that the postal codes were in hexadecimal, I wasn't gut-clenching awake, I was excited to be alive, awake.
Excited to be living.
And mushroom girl rears her head sometimes still, once a summer, once every two summers, and the epiphanies are there and the colours as spectacular as ever.
And tearful girl tears her dress sometimes still, hating her fat calves, her pudgy chin.
But the anxiety these days is emaciated, stretched, it screams with a quiet shrill, no longer the banshee that reached out to gut the surroundings, but the nightingale that reminds me that I, unlike so many of the faces that I have watched go soft and blank, once believed in dreams.
And the anxiety now, that cries and pounds sharp little fists into egyptian cotton, is the violet lining of those dreams, sometimes still so difficult to keep up with, and yet at the same time
so precious.
Saturday night I cried, and cried, and every ounce of negative fell from my face into pools around me. Fat monstre, stupid monstre, monstre who got in over her head at work again, monstre who tries too hard, bad-guy monstre, monstre who doesn't cook enough and monstre who doesn't sew enough and monstre who can't keep a house clean and monstre who dreams hard and real and intentionally.
I woke Sunday morning cleaner than after any Saturday I have ever experienced.
And I have this tiny inkling that the next tearful Saturday will be just a little longer in coming, and just a little more cathartic.
And just a little less painful for the world around me.
And I have this tiny inkling that I'm slowly becoming the person I've been wanting to be.