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,  two women, picking at the stitches, hatefully. Smudging the silk with marmalade. I see their receding gums and the pleats of their skirts under cold light. I smell yeast and burnt hair. The first is called Doubt and the other, Mediocrity. I will describe their images through my nausea.

 

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.  

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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

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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. 

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​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?