Sinister: hello hello i don't know why you say goodbye i say hello

[lindsey baker]

tonight the world showed itself to me and i couldn't bear to look at it with
both eyes open.

so i made wishes instead.

the day started out fine enough. i made sure all the lights in my apartment,
or flat, of you will, were turned off and i came home. home home with my
parents. for the holiday weekend.

the afternoon was fine. shopping. worth skipping description.

today also happened to be my friend tara's 25th birthday. so i went out with
her tonight.

and that's the story i'll tell.

we went to a dinner theater, where you eat a pre-ordered meal of dry, sagey
chicken and watch local actors cavort around. we saw pirates of penzance. 

before the show, tara, like a lot of sinisterites (myself included), was
telling me how lonely she is. (is this topic over? well. maybe. so just skip
to ken's latest if you're tired. i would.) anyway, tara telling me how now
that she's 25 and still a virgin she doesn't want to be that anymore. how
she wants to be 'found' so she can be a pair instead of one. how she's
called this 20-year-old pot-smoking maintenance boy several to ten times in
the last few days for a date.

what should she do? should she settle? etc. etc.

and i, being the girl i am, told her what girls like me should say in that
sort of situation. love yourself. don't settle for anything less than
yourself. don't sleep with someone just to do the deed and later try to make
it mean something it never will.

i always end up being the love confidant. 

and the first wish i made was to be the love confider.

after the show we stopped at a coffee shop (after i dissuaded tara from
driving by pot-smoker's house for a look-see). her sister called and while
they were chatting i read some sinister posts at a web table and blew
bubbles with my chewing gum.

and i wished i could be going to a picnic. (maybe this sentence can count
for content. go b&s.)

tara got off the phone and again started up the alone vs. not alone convo.
and then just drifted off. so we sat there looking at each other in an icky
silence i could no longer fill with trite advice or a false but most likely
true sense of sympathetic comradeship.

and when i got in my car to go home and took my handicapped parking permit
off the rearview mirror and waited for a homeless woman to cross the street,
i wished tara could see just how big and how good she is all on her own.
without a boy or me or anyone else. 

and then i wished the same for myself.

because of that homeless woman in the street. because of my editor who is
waiting for the test results on the lump she found in her breast to come
back. because of me and the fact that i may very well one day, after all the
coating on my nerves has deteriorated, become so crippled i'll know what
life looks like from a sitting position. because of all the people fighting
fights they'll never win, and shouldn't have to fight in the first place.

and i drove and the sigur ros in the cd player crescendoed.

and then i couldn't see the road any more.

because i was crying.

because something so beautiful as that music or tara's heart or my life
should have to be poked and prodded and measured by increments of sound and
sight and smell and taste and touch. that we feel compelled to mold our
lives into something we wish they could be, instead of what they really are.

i once wrote to will salt about a skirt of mine.

a black skirt with a row of pleats at the bottom. and i told him how the
pleats ripple as i walk, and how i love the heavy flowing feeling of the
circle around my knees. and how life should be like the circle of pleats.
neatly pressed overlapping moments that make a really lovely ripple, i think
i said.

so tonight i wish i knew how to fit yesterday and today and tonight and
tomorrow into my ripple of pleats.

i wish i wish i wish i wish i

i think i can, i think i can, they tell you to say.

i think i left my skirt in my apartment.

thanks for reading my diatribes.

lindsey





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