By Caterina Lazzara
She wants to write some kind of clever paradoxical symbolic self-referential bullshit that smashes through the fourth and fifth and sixth walls and uses too many pronouns.
She wants to be that girl who implies things about herself but never lets on whether they’re true so you end up watching her and wondering if she could really be that crazy.
She wants to hate that girl, she really does—because that girl acts like nothing is worth her time, like she knows more about the world than you’ll ever know about her and she doesn’t give a damn about you—but she’s just jealous, so jealous she paints her nails green and red and green again.
She wants to run a marathon, not for the marathon itself but for the movement, the knowing she is running toward you and away from you but never with you because that would imply some kind of correlation, some kind of understanding she will never have with a you or an anybody.
She wants to be a martyr and a slut and a suicide, and that is not a lie, but none of those people would fit into her skin and none of them would let her refer to herself in the third person, so she’ll just shut up and watch the girl who’s watching her and wonder what exactly it takes to be larger than life.
She wants to be able to look at the door and say the door is red because she’s upset and it’s cold in here because she’s alone and the blinds are yellow when she thinks deeply about things because her mother used to wear a yellow dress when she went out, because she remembers the leaving and the clacking of those blue high-heeled shoes as she walked out the red door in the yellow dress, because that feeling of leaving and being left is all she ever thinks about anymore.
She wants to watch this mirror talk about the way she talks—how the things she says imply that she has issues with taking herself and her past seriously, so she’s likely in denial somehow—but she just finds herself watching her reflection breathe and wondering if she has somehow managed to become crazier than legitimate crazy people.
She wants to be a mystery and a lost cause and that weird girl with issues because that would write her three damn novels of worth your time, but her nails are painted for Christmas and the marathon is over and the door is white and the heels are gone and she burned the yellow dress, and what she was planning to say before you walked out on her was I’ve never really wanted anything, to tell you the truth.
Clutching at Straws 