There's me lying on the concrete verandah, in the late afternoon sunlight, as bright as midday, but from another angle. My eyes are closed and I am facing the sun. One tear has squeezed out of one eye and is rolling down my temple. My hands are lying flat, palm down with the freshly applied polish blistering on my nails. Raspberry Rapture. It is supposed to smell like the summer fruit but instead smells sickly sweet and chemical-ly, reminding me both of childish cosmetics kept alongside my Barbie dolls and high school chemistry classes. Reminding me of things I have forgotten. We had to describe things in those classes. We felt it was important to pin down the exact colour, we would forget what the colour meant, but felt triumphant in our exactness. Fuchsia, grass green, salmon pink. We would say one chemical had the aroma of a $2 dollar shop, another of caramelized bananas.
My hair lies beneath my head, I would like to say fanned out, but I doubt it is. I cannot feel where my hair ends, or where it spreads exactly. I can only feel where it starts, and that is no use to me. It is dyed pink and purple in patches, I'm still not sure why. I wonder if I will become the girl with brightly coloured hair. I know how it works, how people make judgements based on one glance, quickly apply labels with a glue that takes some time to wear down.
Some people pick their own labels, with great care. Peeling them off a preprinted sheet with a manicured fingernail, smoothing them down on their left breast, just above the heart. I never did this, instead I kept my ears pricked with avid interest to hear the labels others had chosen for me, hoping to see who I really was, through the eyes of others. But these were always devastatingly superficial. People would say about me, "she has legs," as if most people don't, or that I was the tall one, the skinny one, the quiet one. From these descriptions I hardly seemed like a real person, more a fiction of girlish adolescence.
I said some people really do believe that men and women are different species. He said he used to think so, before he met me.
my label for you:
ReplyDelete"sister who puts up with it all, seemingly unfluttered"
"the one with the hair i wanted" (as opposed to the brother with the fingers i wanted)
whose fingers did you want? I've never looked that closely at all our fingers. I was always jealous of your hair!
ReplyDeleteTate has beautiful fingers (from mum). Mine have square ended nails instead of perfect ovals.
ReplyDeleteMy hair is quite curly today, but in a controlled orderly way, yay!