I am the hob-nobbed product of an unfortunte series of events.
Alright, that's bullshit and self-pity, but there's no denying that I wear those Occurences the way a hamlet under siege wears it's ramparted and pocked walls.
But I am no fortress.
I'm a little confused. As usual. I've come to thrive on it, wearing my Proudly Won Epiphanies like shining trophies of someone greater than I am.
I'm real good at learning, unh-hunh. I know things I shouldn't. Unh-hunh.
But I am nowhere near as chock-full of worldy wisdom as I've had to play the role of, these past years.
Really, I'm just trying to put myself together, drag my sociopathic urges and melodramatic yearnings, step by step, up a staircase of my own invention.
Peter turned to me today with "Do you remember where your parents went wrong?"
There was laughter in his voice, the familiar energetic spasms in his manner, but the question tugged at me.
"I tried to tell her about Marx and Engels, God and Angels
I don't know what for -
But she looked good in ribbons"
--Ribbons, The Sisters of Mercy
I've had "Ribbons" in my head all day. It's funny, how onceuponatime I used to admire and have that strange pity that other people have for kings and emperors for the girl in that song...
Now I just identify. I look back and look for the moment when I first woke up sliced to ribbons and glorying in it, and I can't remember.
I don't remember those moments, I remember epiphanies, thousands of epiphanies - but I can place them all after 1994.
Before that, my memories are chaotic but crystalline photographs, if I follow the pages, I can pick out any one - but as to the extent of what I was thinking it was always "grit your teeth and take it grit your teeth and don't let it get to you..."
(And then it stopped getting to me.)
I remember my first objective vision of myself, my first epiphany, my first realization... In 1994. Overdosed on microdots.
Everything after struck me with more passion and emotion than simple things like birthday cards and sober sunsets should.
I get myself into trouble now, in relationships, with people... Because I'm still swinging that manic pendulum from icicles to furnaces, from GOTTASEEHUGEVERYBODY to I'MTIREDOFTHISGOTTAMOVEON.
I went through people like three-week-long vacations, erratic overjoyed spurts of overwhelming closeness, then sweep them onto my Party Mailing List.
Suivant-next, what else can you teach me about humanity...
Now I'm slowly picking up bits of string and almost-ordinary things, so that I can clothe myself in something other than emotional-harlot-costuming.
So who was I before then?
An android, a clown doll, with razorwire for hair and what I thought was molten lava for blood.
And now?
Sometimes I think I'm just people. But I hate that line of thought.
So I wear my Survivor Stories, and I wear my Indignation, and I wear my Furious Individuality - and I wear my hugs and affection and sheer gleeful love of the stunning people around me - and somewhere in there I think I'm trying to decide which apparel suits me best.
I have no style. I have clothes I wore for ages, clothes I wear now, with no pattern or purpose to them. I wear black, because I can't be arsed to choose what I think I look like.
I can't define myself by People Terms.
Sort of.
I'm getting there.
I'm getting to know myself, step by naked, crawling, mewling step.
I am finally, in this time of luxury and simplicity, rehashing those scars, that have long since healed and stopped hurting,
and I am discovering what they mean to me, as opposed to what they have done to me.
I know what I believe in, and I know what I want, and I know who I am, but I still, don't understand, how to be people.
Sometimes it becomes an autonomic reaction, and sometimes...
...I mean it.
But I'm just letting the crimson in my hair write poetry on my mirror again.