I ask the promise of forever: like the humble woman across the street who wears sweaters, speaks softly and makes fragrant yellow stews. She is so gentle with her children. Her husband loves her and she knows it. When I marry I ask that my dress be victorian and hand-crafted, silk and billowing like a Peace Lily. I ask that my hair crown me like the pollen. I ask to look holy and merciful.   Dress of my obsession, who is keeping you ransom?    What do they ask of me?

 

I see! In a vision I see their faces, the women who’ve taken my dress. Three women, picking at the stitches and smudging the silk with marmalade. Receding gums and pleats bathed in cold light. The smell of yeast and burnt hair.  Doubt, Mediocrity, Insanity.  I’ll try to describe them though it makes me nauseous, 

 

Doubt: coiled thoughts, she rocks and mumbles on a worn seat. The starkness of her fear irritates & confronts; a symbol of what that the world longs to forget. Her boss knows he will have to let her go.  Her presence creates unease, and anyways her typing is sloppy and slow. She knows, and waits for the scene when he is maneuvering a pen in his damp swollen hands, avoiding her eyes, and stuttering excuses. When she will be relieved from her only responsibility and will leave like a mouse, collecting her belongings (a picture-book of castles, a brass watch which belonged to her mother, a sealed letter she wrote to Me)    Your dreams must be addressed / they’re too vast for a young wife / don’t be greedy, apologize / tread softly through your life / your dreams must be addressed / cut & hemmed & trimmed / once you’ve got them shrunken down / wrap them up for him

 

Mediocrity:  Soft from sorrow, eating biscuits at 4:45AM. Her interior landscape has become a carpeted hallway lined with sealed pressboard doors. Only one door remains ajar, the room she hates most and where time moves slowest - there, both Life and Death seem to have hostile intentions. So she tries to become transparent and forgetful, to float above time. Buying boxes of cinnamon biscuits from the drugstore and passing insomniac nights etching words onto the table to extract them from her body.    I don’t love you anymore. I haven’t for a long time. Couldn’t you tell? Can’t you accept that it’s over?

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Insanity:  The man at the desk avoids looking at her and refuses eye contact. He wouldn't be able to articulate the origin of his repulsion, but she knows. He senses the snapping electricity of her inner world. Although she’s well behaved, her presence hints at a sprawling and illogical atmosphere: something ecstatic, damp, incalculable... odours of metal, burnt fuses... He refuses to serve her. She reminds him of a recurrent little-boy nightmare, and his dreaded visits to grandmother who drew strange pictures and laughed at odd moments:

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"I’m waving my arms at a statue, dissolved from my own land

tho I’d be looked at clear and proud, if I was a man

& the world would turn to me. Agree with who I am…

But Lunacy’s Pure, it’s communion with Her: the dirt on whom you stand"