8:43 a.m. | 2006-03-22
The Sky Opened Up and Let It Out
Dreamer. She loved to dream. Her nights were filled with them. Her days were filled with them. Every moment she could she found herself drifting off to somewhere else. She never imagined the impossible, though. She didn�t dream of owning companies or flying airplanes or performing surgery.
She dreamt about cherry hardwood floors, about flowers in the entry hall always, about snow sticking to her eyelashes, about the soft sing-song quality of someone else�s voice. She would get lost in thought a lot. Usually when there was something of import to be done (but because she had this way of timing herself she always knew when she could leave and when she couldn�t afford to).
Sometimes she�d drift back to high school and reanalyze decisions she had made. Her hand on a cup of tea (she never steeped it for more than a minute) and her eyes drifting as her feet wriggled below her. She loved music that made her feel deeper than she was and sang of stories that didn�t relate to her but that she could pull single details from and wrap them around her as if she could have written that song about her life.
She wanted a pot rack when she grew up. But she didn�t really know where to put the line on that. She�d been independent forever. She�d been self reliant for years and had been more adult than all of her friends for as long as she could remember. So when should she get the pot rack? Each time she went shopping in a store that carried them she�d browse by and look up at the displays. Suddenly she wasn�t surrounded by new Calphalon cookware (boxes upon boxes) or new mixers or food processors � she was staring out her kitchen window into her backyard. She was watching the sun set and you could hear the jibber jabber of children in the background.
She always shook her head twice, fast, and mostly to the left, blinking once as she came back. She was surrounded by boxes of pots and pans, steamers, double boilers and the like. She was the kind of girl who always just hoped that she�d know the point at which it was ok to buy one of those. The point at which it was acceptable and standard and�ok.
For now she knew she�d take too much flack and even if they didn�t say it out loud she�d hear people judging her every time she stared at the damn thing hanging in her kitchen because again it�d be her way of putting it over on them, and they�d know it. They�d know that she thought it was nice and grown up and they�d feel like it was just a thumb in the face of who they are and what they�d accomplished.
To make the time pass she�d sing harmonies (by herself) because she had been told on occasion that her voice wasn�t gorgeous. She�d make sure no one was watching and that her windows were rolled up and that the second a tear fell she�d catch it with a tissue and just pray that her cheeks weren�t getting too red.
