The Pantomime Artist

[This one is shoved pretty damn far up its own ass, and the ending is pretty damn weak, but damned if I don't think it's pretty. I've been editing the whole thing in an attempt to plush it up, but it's easy to distinguish the original writing by its brutally choppy scansion... I was pretty pleased with that sort of style back in the day.]

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When I was nineteen, I got a small tattoo and moved into a smoking dorm. I met a balding screenwriter in film school and quickly I became the type of girl who ends up with unattractive men, hanging off of their fingers and wearing sundresses without bras. On summer nights I’d sleep over at their bungalows when their wives were gone, and I’d stand on the bed and stop the ceiling fan with my hand so the sticky air would be still. I shared my weed with them and we went to dinner parties stoned, looking like we were deeply in love.

When I was five, I arbitrarily decided that my one dream was to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Before that dream faded completely from my heart, I went into a relationship with a man rich enough to take me to Paris, and we didn't speak a word as our plane drifted over the ocean. The afternoon was gray when we finally reached the tower, and I stood directly under it, looking up into its dark skeleton and shivering in the chill of its unfriendly shadow. Clutching my wool coat tight around me, I climbed the steps to the top. I looked out over the city and the river. My cheeks were numb and I smelled pigeon shit. At the bottom, a black boy jingled souvenir keychains on a metal ring. He fixed his eyes so firmly upon me that I could feel them inside of me, like a pair of cold marbles in the bottom of my gut. A shudder ran through my spine, and I handed him a bill, walking away empty-handed.

When I was twenty-seven, my younger sister was in a car accident. After I got the call, I ran until I found her, strangely still amidst the chaos around her. I kept up with the gurney as it sped through the hallways, but I couldn't hear anything, and I couldn't see where I was going; all I could do was stare at her face. Her features were crushed, and I tried desperately to recognize her, but all I saw was blood. I held her hand, and it felt like a baby mouse inside of mine. Suddenly the hall ended, so I let go and she went through swinging doors and died. I had gotten back together with the screenwriter then. He proposed after eight months, and we were engaged for two before I left him. I moved away and spent hours sitting in front of my laptop writing by candlelight, trying to describe exactly how my sister’s face looked before she died. Two years later, I finished a semi-autobiographical screenplay. One agent, a delicate British woman, said that the script just wasn’t realistic. While watching the small way her pale lips moved, I realized that writers don’t know anything except the inside of their own skulls. Once I left my own head, I could only flatter reality.

I never forgot that, but I kept writing. When I was thirty, I had learned that reality alone wasn’t enough to satisfy me.