I want 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 want my dress to look victorian and be crafted by hand; silky and billowing like a Peace Lily, my hair crowning me like the pollen. I will look as holy and merciful as the woman across the street. Will you permit it? Oh, Dress of my obsession - who is keeping you ransom? What do they ask of me?

 

I see! In a hideous vision I see their faces, the ones who’ve confiscated my dress. I see them, three women, picking at the stitches and smudging the silk with marmalade. I see their receding gums and the pleats of their skirts absorbing cold light. I smell yeast and burnt hair. Doubt, Mediocrity, Insanity. I’ll try to describe their images, though it makes me terribly nauseous:

 

Doubt: Crusted in rough skin, coiled thoughts, rocking and mumbling to herself on a worn seat. The starkness of her fear irritates her acquaintances. The way she fears is confrontational; she is a squeamish symbol of the things people labour to forget. Her boss knows he will have to let her go, her presence is fouling the office and her work is sloppy. She knows it, too - and awaits the May I speak with you for a moment? He will maneuver his pen in damp swollen hands, avoid her eyes, and stumble through a script of phoney empathy. Then she’ll leave like a mouse, without protest. Relieved from her only responsibility, she collects her belongings: a picture-book of the Castles of Switzerland, a brass watch that 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 and hemmed and trimmed / once you’ve got them shrunken down / wrap them up for him

 

Mediocrity:  Soft with sorrow, eating biscuits late at night. Her interior landscape has become a drab carpeted hallway lined with sealed pressboard doors. Only one door remains ajar, and it’s the room she hates most. It is the room where time moves the slowest, and both living and dying seem to have hostile intentions. Unsure of why she got involved in life, she tries to grow transparent, forgetful, and float above time. She buys boxes of cinnamon biscuits from the drugstore and keeps them stocked in her cupboard. She passes insomniac nights at her table, scratching words into the surface, trying 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 face, and refuses eye contact, because he senses the electricity snapping in her brain. Even when she’s well behaved her presence hints at a sprawling and illogical atmosphere, though he would struggle to articulate that. Something ecstatic, damp, incalculable... smelling of metal, and burnt lightbulbs. This is why he is refusing to serve her at the airport kiosk. She reminds him of his recurrent little boy nightmare of the Witch, and his dreaded hospital visits to his grandmother who drew strange pictures and laughed too much.

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She watches it happen, she’s seen it before

her sisters watch too, through her face

she gets unplugged and plasticized, humanity erased

 

the underworld burns thru her comet eyes

she sings through the disgrace:

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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