Heel

Because of the level of professionalism in my office, I find myself often clattering in heels these days like a real grown up. I makes me taller and I'm fine as long as I don't try to walk anywhere. I mostly wheel around the office in my rolling chair. Busy, busy, busy today in a way that I like--time flies when you're writing letters, constructing press releases, editing articles, searching for photographs, and trying to come up with a theme for a new campaign. We like dragons. I may have to soon purchase some dragon paraphernalia, perhaps get a huge Japanese dragon on my back.

Went briefly to Borders after work to search for some of the books I discovered in at the writing retreat; books I can't yet afford to buy, but no one can stop me from opening up a new book and smelling its pages, something I seem to be compelled to do. Still lots and lots of chick lit out there. Here's one example: A girl has a great, wonderful, and boring husband. She still pines for Leo, a man she loved in college who didn't seem to love her back. One day, she runs into this Leo and her world is thrown into chaos!!! I flipped through some of it, and though I didn't read the ending, I can tell you what will happen: she will almost cheat on her husband with this Leo. She will discover that Leo is really an asshole and not worth her time. She will go running back to her husband, who will grudgingly take her back. There will be one last scene where she almost lets herself think back with boy-colored glasses at the jerk from her past, but she will finally come to terms with the fact that she has an awesome life in the suburbs. I feel like I could write this story in three days while drinking vodka and eating Triscuits. That said, I do have a Leo and so can sort of relate.

My Leo was a guy from college; a great actor who was also completely off in many ways--I think he did a lot of drugs, but I translated it to mean that he was different and interesting. Plus, he was extremely, painfully attractive and he was also great onstage. I've always been attracted to people who are good at artistic things, like pretending to like you while really just practicing a role in Look Homeward, Angel. We never dated. Does anyone date in college? I never did. Instead, we hooked up after 3-5 theatre parties. Once, we made out on Mainstage, lying down on the stage bed that was part of an Arthur Miller play. A perfect symbolic moment of the entire debacle. At parties, he would spend most of the time off in a distant corner or maybe not showing up at all until the last possible second and I would pine and drink cheap, warm beer and try to ignore him or if he wasn't there, try to develop a crush on one of tech theatre guys. Just when I thought it was hopeless, he would swoop over to me, say something that I found unbelievably charming, and off we'd go on his moped (!) to his crummy apartment with the mattress on the floor covered in dinosaur sheets. But when he looked at you, he did it in such a way that it made it seem like he was really seeing you--or me, in this case, which was disconcerting and thrilling. And he was always leaving. I think he showed up places just so he could make a good exit. I cut me to the core in a way that only intense and unfulfilled crushes can do. He dropped out of school to move to New York. I saw him again about five years later in Seattle after a college friend got married. I thought he would be different. I was sure I would. I wasn't. Something about the way we communicated or didn't communicate made it impossible me for to say anything without feeling stilted and self-conscious. I stayed for two nights at his place and he said, Your visit suddenly became so important to me that I just...Maybe his super power was that he never finished a sentence. Everything he began to say ended in ellipses, leaving it open ended for any number of possible interpretations.

The second night, he took me to a bar and flirted with a girl who had a gigantic head, and at the end of the night, I had to trail after him back to his place, where we slept side by side on his bed and I thought surely I would die. I wonder though if I would feel the same if I saw him again. He's nearby--I have his email. He's not married. But no fucking way. No way. I cannot be that girl again.

The picture here is one that comes up when you do a google search for his name. It's not him (though there are photos of him out there too. Oh, crap, and a film reel. Of course, I'll watch it), but I like this photo on not-him better. Not-him if he lived in the 1950s. Still dapper, surely. When you do a google search for my name, you get a picture of a horse. I do not have the energy to interpret the symbolic meaning of that. But I do like the title of this blog, because it's appropos in so many ways.


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