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In Which the Girl Finds It Necessary to Speak of Herself in the
by Natalie JonesIn Which the Girl Finds it Necessary to Speak of Herself in the Third-Person
She finds it difficult to recognize her own face in the mirror anymore. She realizes
the older she gets, the more she grows into herself, yes, but all the while also becomes
less attached to her beauty, finding it intangible and mostly without meaning. She
is lonely a lot. She resents many external things for the truth about the state of her
loneliness, but she also blames herself. These days she carries a distinct fear of living
alone, of, in the end, dying alone, but realizes itÂ’s the living alone that is far worse than
the dying, for it is far longer and inconsolable. She worries she will never find her own
one true love, worries of the real and biting possibility of not finding love due to fear and
growing laziness. For as she grows, she feels herself getting lazier. More inclined to
give up on the ideals of poetry or the romance of city streets she once celebrated in exchange,
now, for long and pleasant sleep at night. And mornings spent less often with words, now,
and more often spent gazing from her open window, sun and wind hitting the spots on her
which are unclothed. She feels the mystery draining out of her. She has little energy
anymore for weaving into the stories of her life elaborate beauty or dramatic peaks and
valleys into a life that – in the absence of her self-proclaimed brilliant commentary on it –
is rather still and ordinary. This she attempts to become okay with. She imagines it will
humble her eager heart and mind which love to make things more than what they are. She
hopes that this maturation will bring her closer to humanity, closer to god, closer to being
a less contrived version of her own truth. But in it all, she grows less content, she grows
into the drapes hanging, the curtains billowing around her windows. She finds that the
days become eerily alike. Before ever even having lived many of them, they are so similar.
The more days which pass, the more she realizes how many just like them she has been
through before this. Perhaps this is just what it feels like for her consciousness to age. She
pauses when she worries like this, tries to focus on breathing, to breathe slower, but has a
hard time focusing on the things just before her when so much of this aging is filling in
calendars and having commitments set in place leaving rather little time in which her mind
can be alone, alone to remember herself, to revel in her creations. She never wanted children,
she only wanted poems. Rucksacks full of all the words she held in her mouth spitting them
out one at a time in little trickles like menstrual blood, shedding the lining, emptying the
words so she can breathe again. She knows this truth like the truth of a man nameless to her
dying now in any place in silence. The truth of the humanity she tries to know and cannot.
To be alone in the world, to be alone in your own life. To feel your hands wrinkling. To
truly realize that the only youth you will ever have has just passed you by. She sits on her
bed, she curls her legs beneath her and blinks intermittently. She looks at the piles of books
in their dusty corners, so many sentences forming her definition: their lines running circles
around this invisible bubble she keeps between herself and others in the world. She is grateful
for it. She presses her cheek to the wall. It feels like cold stone. She can hardly remember
the texture to so many hands she once thought she loved. She feels like she has been alone
for a very long time. She is not wrong in thinking this, she accepts this as a fate from which she
will benefit. She shudders and smiles. She is her own puzzle of herself she is forever solving.
This has not been easy.
03/25/2006 Author's Note: notes (to self):
-written after watching “dogville” three times and while reading adam bede by george eliot
-I can’t breathe with these words in my mouth, “contrast and compare” by bright eyes
-I remember myself, that’s the work that I do, “this is not the house that pain built” by dar williams
Posted on 03/25/2006
Copyright © 2010 Natalie Jones
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Kristina Woodhill on 03/25/06 at 09:45 PM This is really a fine, readable self exploration. For those of us looking back on as many years as we have ahead (well, theoretically, anyway :)), this rings so true. Your last line - "she is her own puzzle of herself she is always solving" is brilliant. |
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