picture a turtle yesss an animated turtle -- with top hat and pink satin vest and tuxedo jacket -- picture her cane with a doorknob- shaped topper  of moonstone reflecting back light in a  sparkle of rainbows, still holding the warm glows  of substance inside -- picture the turtle now dancing offstage with a    pause at the curtain's edge for a grin    at the variegated audience --  all me in many guises -- a mirror with kaleidescopic planes and angles... some still entranced with the turtle's bold performance of soft shoe with tap shoe percussion spinning    and grinning onstage...    some numb with their own perceptions... some eager to join in when next turtle performs. these norms entice me into a life more than leftover dreams out of echoes of (shhhhh. screams cut off....) see turtle doff top hat with a bold, broad wink and a  bright wide grin...and run offstage.

My name, all legal and recorded and reproduced on certificates and documents and identifying cards, is:   Linda

When someone i don't recognize addresses me as Beth or Carol or Christina and proceeds into conversation as if they know me -- i smile. I listen. . . .recognizing kinship and connection with "others also me" who DON'T always pretend to BE me when they go outside.  I try to withdraw gracefully or laughing  and winking baudily or softly saying, "I'm glad we met again"..... as these others-also-me might do it....

and i?  i, linda, go about my business.  muted. disoriented. sometimes with a pounding screaming all-encompassing headache waving at the grungies in my guts -- and a grin, when i can remember, for anyone who might see me.

(these nameless, faceless, shimmering anyones who might see me, after all,  have no NEED to understand how it is a fifty-something woman with frumpish lack of attention to appearances and details and time.....might rhyme a response to any question they might ask just then -- and when i was older and younger and more inVOLVED than i am mostey now, i learned a bright generic grin allowed anyones to feel more comfortable in who they were and what THEY were doing....so they were less likely to ask me questions of consequence i've NEVER had the right answers to, anyway.)

Because you are here already, a grin would be perhaps superfluous..... even dishonest, in a way.  For here we are "survivors".  Here we are telling bits and pieces of -- not who we ARE, for we are not finished -- but how we got to be here in bits and pieces the WAY we are.

Linda was somewhere between 4 and 5 years old before she recognized not EVERYBODY did what she did. (Vinnie, "the little boy next door" did not waver or tense and disappear somewhere inside himself when his mommy or daddy said something to him. He did not hold his breath or grip his fingers, ready to slide away, when they spoke to each other, even when one or the other spoke loud enough for both of us to hear them or when both of them were laughing. Vinnie was Vinnie. All the time.)

By then, of course, THAT information -- that "difference" -- was just one more dark secret to be kept and hidden and protected away from any one. By then, one more secret-in-the-dark was just one more WRONG thing about Linda.

Like being a child of the devil and a liar. Like having tummy aches and straight, unruly hair. Like knowing how to disappear. Like waking up in bruises and like laughing, right out loud in church, when a sound someone was singing tickled her behind an ear or under her sides.  Like knowing she COULD find out how babies got here, somehow, and love and rock a BUNCH of em.....  Like knowing how to make a bump in a man's lap.

So?

Linda grew up, anyway.  Stubborn and willful and wary.  Able. A lone, "loose cannon" in some situations. ...  . loose-jointed and ugly and most alone and lonely when other people existed near her. Determined to find and make and BE room and space and safe-to-be places for the others who were NOT linda to be themselves in -- knowing she'd get the blame for their noises and nasties and mistakes and pleasures...knowing, also, she'd somehow-inappropriately take the credit for their abilities to smooth surfaces and blend colors and find notes and chords and agree*meants to touch and tender hearts -- just as she had ALL WAYS done.  One way or another.

Because she DID.

The secrets? Not anything anyones would want to hear about, anyway. So long ago, and all.

So nothing-to-be-done-about-them-now, and all.

So common, really. So ORdinary. So D-sensitized to and so "ho hum. so?", prime-time and day-time TV shows make "entertainment" of them in between commercials and public announcements and hints and reminders of what might come next on your don't-change-that-channel all-in-living-color tell-all wide-screen vision scream.  Errrrr.  Ummmm.  Screen.

I survived.  So?

Now, about LIVING........

© 2000.moonriseunlimited

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