I smell lime. I don't know where the smell is coming from. We don't have lime trees around here, and nobody's been to the market in days. It makes me nauseous. I know it's supposed to have the opposite effect, but it doesn't. You can just count on me to do everything backwards. I just hate lime. And I hate this weather. And I hate my life.
So where do I begin? This morning? Last year? My birth? All are good places to start, but none will do. My story must be as chaotic as I am, as my soul is.
I was born twenty-seven years ago, in a little town in Arizona. For years I thought I would never get away. I hated my little town. Yes, it was cozy and familiar and nice. Everybody knew me and I knew everybody. It didn't take me long (elementary school tops) to feel suffocated, to feel I had to break free and move somewhere bigger, more roomy, with unfamiliar faces around.
But I never did. I'm still stuck in the same old place. Yes, for a short period of four years I went to college, far away, as far away as I could think; I went all the way to California. Very far indeed. And yes, I've met some unfamiliar faces. Bizarre ones, even. I don't know what is best anymore - the strange things you don't know or the strange things you do know. Never resolved that one in my mind. Anyway, college was fun, highly educational of course. I came out with a degree but no job in sight. That's what happens when you major in arts. So I came back home; with my tail between my legs, one would say. (Actually, one did say. More than one, for that matter.) So now I'm home and all I can think of is getting away again. Never happy, are you, deary?
Twenty-seven and I feel like a baby. I look in the mirror and see the same chubby pink cheeks I've always had. I hated these cheeks. I still do. They make me look about ten years younger than I really am. When people mistake me for a teenager, mom always tells me to embrace it, to accept it as a compliment. She tells me I have her youthful complexion, that this means I would look as young and fresh as she does at fifty. But I don't want to look like her. I'd rather look old and wrinkled. I'd rather look seventy and not resemble her, with her snotty expression and that smile so full of herself. Anyway, I see no good in being regarded ten years younger than what you really are. It means you left your life intact. It means your face is showing your lack of life experience, flaunting it for the world to see.
Twenty-seven years old. How did I get so old so quickly? When did I turn my head away and got to this absurd amount of years under my belt? It must be a mistake. I haven't done anything yet. How could I be twenty-seven years old already?
Mom is baking me a cake. Of course she's doing it at aunt Bev's. What does she think? That I can't see her sneaking there at eight A.M., when I know she's usually here at this time of morning? That I can't recognize the smell of a baking cake from across the street? That I can't hear my twin cousins giggling over the wrappers and balloons and decorations that she asked them to help hang up?
Most of all, I wish they would all just leave me alone, let me be. The last thing in the world I feel like is celebrating the end of another year in which I've done absolutely nothing to promote my life. But I guess it's out of my hands; everything seems to be out of my hands lately.
Sure, I had dreams, when I was younger. I was going to be a pirate, and a pilot and a detective and an astronaut. I can't put my finger on when they just disappeared and I had resolved to live in oblivion, in compromise. But I sure had.
I guess this is the life I've chosen for myself. No reason to complain, right? I'm the mistress of my own destiny, isn�t that true? So why is it that I feel so helpless? So paralyzed? So dead?
Twenty-seven years old today. I don't remember ever being so sad on my birthday. On the contrary, as a child I used to welcome every birthday with a cheer. I loved birthdays, mine and others'. When did everything change? And how come it also stayed exactly the same?
My mom closes the door quietly. She thinks I'm still asleep. Birthdays haven't been the same since Dad got out of the picture, but Mom really tries her best to compensate for it. It just isn't working. I feel sorry for her. I feel obliged to pretend.
So here I go, dressed in the hideous light green dress that my mom bought me for my twenty-sixth birthday. My mom thinks it makes me look so pretty, like Cinderella maybe, but I think it makes me look pathetic, Like an 80's Homecoming Queen wannabe. There's nothing more pathetic than that. But I have to put on an act. Somehow life always seems to depend on my playing my role down to the last detail.
My mom kisses me. I wish she didn't. My sister is waiting downstairs. She's almost as pathetic as I am. Twenty-four and also living at home. Of course I have a three-year advantage, or is it disadvantage? I can never tell. She is kissing me too. What is it with them and kissing? Kissing implies closeness, and there's no one in the world I feel more distanced from than my mother and my sister.
"Let's go to your auntie Bev," my mom says. "She's real sick and she wants to see you before we go out." Like I don't know. I hate surprise parties. I feel like a five-year-old.
(Always complying, never complaining. That's me. A poster child in an advertisement for congeniality.)
Mom closes the door. My sister is leading the way. I feel like I'm the star in a circus parade, in a freak show. Am I a freak, Mom? Am I? My mom smiles proudly. I wish I were dead.
Bev opens the door with a robe. She plays her part to perfection. Yes, she's very sick but she wanted to see her beloved niece and congratulate her in person. Why don't we come in? It would only take a minute.
So we go in, and surprisingly enough, my moron cousins appear with paper hats and balloons, throwing confetti on me and on the rug beneath my feet. I want to turn around and escape. I've had enough humiliation for one day. Twenty-seven years too many. I've lived twenty-seven years too long on this planet.
Where are you aliens to abduct me? Take me away from here. Operate on my body, use me for whatever needs you may see fit. Just take me away from here. Everything, anything must be more sane than staying in this hellhole one more second.
And they do hear me, or so it seems. The green little creatures are coming to get me. I run to the lawn and lift my arms to the sky. Come and get me. Come. Don't leave me here. Don't go.
Was I too eager? Do they only want people who show resistance? Why wasn't I notified? They never tell you this on science fiction movies on TV.
Mom is looking at me like there is something wrong with me. What could be more wrong than spending my life here when I'm twenty-seven? Not knowing where my father is and painfully knowing, every minute of my existence, where my sister and my mother are? I want to be taken to other planets. Maybe Dad is there. If not, maybe I'm there. It's about time I found out.
But they're already gone, and I'm down on my knees. My green dress clashes with the green of the grass. There are no green creatures to take me away from my miserable existence.
I rise and shake the grass leaves off my dress.
September 4, 1999
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