Lines

There's a fine line between who I want to be and who I am.  Some days, these two ladies meet up and it's like a party you wish you'd been invited to--good music, laughter, delicious food that won't make you fat--but others days it's the sad ass party you threw as a kid that no one, not even your stuffed animals wanted to attend.  The one where everyone was supposed to speak in a foreign accent and sip tea like they liked it even though no one really discovers tea until their twenties.

That line is fine, hard to see, but it trips me again and again.  Just when I think I have a handle on how to be a friend and teacher, a daughter and sister, a woman and still--deep inside where very few people get to look--a little girl, something happens and I am tripping all the hell over that line, mixing those women up into a cocktail of doubt and anxiety and swirling purple strains of sadness.

I read recently, in Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist", that old lilac wood, deep in its center, has streaks of deep purple in it.  I've been obsessed with that image, that heart of color beating inside something that seems outwardly dead, something royal buried in something forgotten.  I feel like there is that in me ("I know not what it is, but I know it is in me"): that same richness is here, but I have to be cracked open to get to it and I'll be damned if I'm not tired of cracking. 

I don't want to have to trace these lines or watch out for them or fill them in with expensive products or color within them.  I want to acknowledge their existence and move the hell on but who ever gets to do that?  It feels like an impossibility, most days, that moving on.  But I'm trying.  I am, forver it seems, trying.