By; Gypsy Lennon
Stephanie was born, not into a world of chaos, applause, mass trauma, or sever crisis. Rather, she was born into a sterile green hopsital room with florescent white lights. RONALD REGAN was printed in big, black, bold letters across the ovale office doors. Although Ronald had long since checked out to lunch.
She, for the first part of her life, lived in a small blue room where "My little Ponies" pulled "Barbie" and "G.I. Joe" away in a "just married" carriage.
She died the for the first time when she was nine. the weight of her supposed "uncle" crushing all the air out of her demanding lungs. What in reality was only a few minutes seemed to be an eternity. But she survived, and she discovered just waht the word "Love" really ment. And that understanding made her hard.
In 1994, when Kurt Cobain too his onw life, and several other "lost" teens followed suit, she, in all her long-underweared, combat-booted, flannel-shirted, greasy-haired glory simply rolled her eyes and said; "God, life is such a joke. But who's the bigger fool, the man who gets beat by life? Or the man who dies trying to beat life? I am such the fool on the hill." And she became jaded.
She grew up to fast--left her role as child in her own childhood, for the role of adult in another childs, childhood. She fell in lust for a boy, and she threw her world away. She left all she knew, and when she touched down to another place and time, her gilded, golden, and glass cage shattered.
She was lying there in the mess of shards of crystal--all that remained of her self built cage.
Yet somehow, she survived to roll her eyes, and say; "GOD! Life is SUCH a joke!! 'To be or not to be. That is the question. Wether tis nobler in the mind to suffer a sea of troubles or the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...?' I AM the fool on the hill."
And upon the complete destruction of herself, she consumed herself in fire. Yet she arose out of her ashes, like that of the Great Phoenix.
Always out of her own ashes, new, yet somehow the same. She struggled on to meet another of her kind, another Phoenix--He who could rise out of his ashes just as well and as fast as could she. Together they lived, grew, and loved.
For you see my fellow survivors of this game, it is love and only love that keeps the fools in this world. For it is them that see this world, not as it is, but rather, as it COULD be. And in that blurred moment in time, they find the strength to bring others into this world.
But in that wild, frenzied state of the '80's, when Stephanie was born, she, like so many of her kind, was in fact born dead.
Stephanie was Still Born.