9:20 a.m. - 2005-06-24
Independence Rant
So my days were stimulating, my nights delicious. I filled my small living room with bent willow, intended for some back porch in Appalacia, just because I could. It was a matching set I had found at a street fair in Studio City, hand made by a couple of blissed out hippies with tie-dyed eyes. There was a twisted love seat, a coffee table that never held a cup steady because it was basically just a series of horizontal sticks and two pokey chairs, each twiggier than the last. I threw some mismatched chintz pillows here and there. While it made them look even quainter, it didn't add much in the way of comfort. That was okay. The living room was pretty much just for show anyway, as was the tiny kitchen. I lived in the bedroom. I ate, read, watched t.v., wrote, talked on the phone, slept and occasionally entertained guests in my queen sized bed with the patchwork quilt. Every inch of wallspace, even the miniature bathroom, sprouted bunches of baby's breath in thrift shop wicker baskets. Dried rose bouquets hung upsidedown from pastel grograine ribbon. Mermaids brushed endless tresses on every spare surface, table and shelf and refrigerator and toilet tank. There were bookcases, cherry, pine and oak. Sylvia Plath and e.e. cummings rubbed elbows with Freud and Jung. Everywhere I looked, I found my reflection. I was no longer invisible. There in my enchanted hall of mirrors, I celebrated making my acquaintence. That first Christmas, I felt like Charlie Brown, coming home with my scraggly tree. I wanted to do it alone. To set it in the dining room atop the table, a sparkly testimony to individuation, self discovery, frozen burritos. I sang Christmas carols to Jesus, by myself. I don't know what the neighbors thought. Maybe I looked pathetic, there in the window carefully placing each ornament just where it belonged. The best part was that I never doubted, even for a moment, that I was just where I belonged.
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