she's alone but chemically balanced

See her there. Looking very ill-at-ease. Don’t know why. Maybe because she isn’t happy with her makeup. Perhaps because she’s menstruating. Maybe because she doesn’t feel like being friendly. She believes in something beyond her experience but is afraid to commit. 

She likes to project herself onto monotonous people. Always becomes impatient with clichés and hackneyed plots. She doesn’t understand why it rains or why there’s lightning in the sky or how many senators there are, but she knows how to manipulate a man, for damn sure,

and how to suspend belief, which is always a valuable skill. 

So what if her boyfriend thinks she’s “certifiably coo coo?” She still has nice firm tits and a face that adolescent boys fantasize about. She looks in the mirror. Time to lose the glasses and get Lasik surgery. Looks at the bags under her eyes and the crow’s feet. Time for a minor

plastic surgery. She lifts her blouse and looks at her belly. Time for liposuction. Her hair is still blonde; there’s no sign of any graying. Done everything wrong my whole life, she thinks, and still have enough residual confidence left over to… It’s no good. The thought is no good, mostly because she can’t complete it. She is forever beginning thoughts and not finishing them. She chalks this up to having recently diagnosed herself with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder after watching a commercial on the Lifetime network. Or was it Oxygen? She can never keep those two networks

straight. All she knows is one of them plays reruns of Oprah and the other… oh, who the hell knows… the wine is the thing… and the third glass is really the thing…

In her journal that night, she writes:

“I would have been called voguish in the twenties, reactionary in the thirties, cantankerous in the forties, loud in the fifties, liverish in the sixties, nebulous in the seventies, self-denying in the eighties, semiconscious in the nineties… these days I’m just called a laughing sinner…

I’ve really scrambled to get where I am… I’m common… a proletariat…

my lips have become a joke… my eyebrows, exaggerated… my eyes, presbyopic… my vocabulary, tiresome… don’t even know the definition of “self.” I’m brave but disengaged, slavishly devoted to feather-light comedies… I aggressively seek out the role of being on the down-low… I have an arsenal of rage…” She puts the pen down, closes her eyes, and thinks about something her mother once said to her: “The secret is being able to do anything and not

knowing where you’re going to end up at the end of the day and just letting fate fall into the palm of your hand.” She looks carefully at the palms of her hands. She thinks they’re the only parts of me that have not aged, and she sighs.

Reviews

[Philip Gaber]

Those are optimal points. I like to write abstract snippets of life and hope the audience can come to some interpretation themselves. I break rules in writing constantly, many times unsuccessively. Sometimes I need a switch taken to my arse, but I'm learning. Thanks, bro.

[roarke]

Strong points. But I ask, who is the woman? Who is the narrator? Would knowing this change the perspective and intent of the piece? Toe dipping in a tepid pool… dive in, why is she writing in her diary? Is she famous? Is she writing an autobiography… etc. I say these things because I have a couple dozen writes where there’s lots of good content, but something is missing, they lay dead in the water, waiting for the U-boat torpedoes. And I’ve found, when I hit that stage, that a good session of asking questions helps break the impasse and then the price moves ahead full speed… but that’s just me, and my two cents worth. And no criticism of your write here.