Supposed To Be
Posted on 29 September 2012
I am not supposed to be awake, writing at this late hour, losing my mind in that way I have that I know is creeping back up on me.
It makes me loud and outrageous, but only on the inside, I hope. On the outside, I try too hard, I act in public the way I think might be charming, or cute, or smart, only to arrive home later berating myself for being so fucking strange.
What kind of girl are you? I ask myself this. The answers vary from “regular weird” to “what the fuck is going on in your head?” It’s not enough to eat mangos with a pocket knife after all night jazz, it’s not enough to make love on the rooftops of broken-into buildings, it’s not enough to pretend to be a normal mother and wife. You can’t bury that shit deep enough.
So at night, when you’re supposed to be sleeping so you can get up and make pancakes like a regular person might do, you are up, dreaming, writing, making a spectacle of yourself even from the quiet dark of a lost bedroom in a hundred year old house, where wee ones sleep and ghosts dance, no matter how hard you will them away.
1 Response to Supposed To Be
I was 16 when Fatal Attraction came out, and it cast a long shadow over my sex life. Glenn Close was supposed to be mad in the film, and her attraction to Michael Douglas was, of course, fatal – but no matter. I watched their sex scenes open-mouthed, in awe and alarm. This, I supposed, was what passion ought to look like: frantic, with hair-pulling, back-arching, up against walls, in lifts; and always ending in perfectly timed mutual ecstasy. In Hollywood, orgasms are so synchronised it’s practically an Olympic sport.