Stare

Stare

Your gaze is coarse

Like line-dried linens

Sweet-smelling and

Sun-warm but rough to the touch

You strip me of verbs

And use them to

Skin me, pepper me with your pupils

And sear my being

With heavy nouns I blush to utter

But I return your gaze

Resolutely

As an insolent child stares down the sun.

Another Sunday Confessional

I am becoming exactly what I always wanted to be when I grew up. That doesn't happen for many people; I should feel blessed. I do feel blessed. But today I dream of the days when I had nothing, owned nothing, but nebulous dreams.

I remember a seventeen year-old Nadya, napping in a corner booth of the diner in between double shifts. I remember sleeping soundly, pleased with the morning's tips, which I would dutifully save in my college fund on my day off. I remember the euphoria and despair of young love, feverish first kisses and violent heartbreaks. I remember pimples and bad hair days and fashion blunders and chuckle at the realization that time does not alter everything.

I remember forceful encounters with mortality. I remember dying. I remember the hand that pulled me from hell and the mouth that breathed cool air into my burning lungs. I remember the crushing gratitude and elation I felt when I'd been given a second life. I remember decisively setting out to deserve it.

I remember the pang of - something - which reminded me that I'd left someone behind, buried among the mort and rubble. I remember jam-packing my new life with enough distractions to muffle each twinge. It almost worked. Except, of course, for the fact that I still remember.

Hairbrush Microphone

When I was a kid, I spent hours each day in front of the full-length mirror that was attached to my closet door.  I turned my little boom box up full blast and became Janet Jackson or Mariah Carey or Selena. At school and on the block I was a skinny, frizzy-haired ‘goody-goody’ who fit every nerdy stereotype imaginable. I even willingly wore plaid skirts, knee-high stockings, penny loafers, and a beret – an actual beret – to school most days. But as soon as class had ended, I hurriedly skipped back home, absconded to my claustrophobic room with the peeling floral wallpaper and circa 1970s shag carpet, shed my schoolgirl getup and became a diva. In the womblike safety of my bedroom I could be sex. I could be style. I could be success. I could be everything I wasn’t. I had scores of stuffed animals who sat enthralled through hours of impassioned singing (or lip-synching, when my parents were home) and showered me with shouts of adulation.

 Nowadays, it seems there are scarcely enough idle minutes, let alone hours, for me to spend daydreaming. But when I’m late to that thing I have to attend, to that place where my domineering adulthood requires me to be, it’s usually because I’ve stolen away to that little room again, that delightful world of my infancy. I unremorsefully miss your important phone call or fail to respond punctually to your urgent email because one hand is holding a hairbrush microphone and the other is sending kisses floating off into an imaginary crowd.