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1.
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Although I couldn’t remember the details exactly, I was apparently suppose to get married to a little man in stucco pants who was waving at me from the steps of the library. We had been talking lupus for a few weeks but I didn’t think anything really came of that, but my parents thought differently and had arranged for a quickie marriage – civil, not spiritual, while even though my parents were both terribly Catholic, they respected my atheism enough not to push it. The little man was only about 4 feet tall after all.
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I woke up in my room and wrestled with my lungs in my chest from the narrow view my surroundings had become. I had the feeling everyone thought I was a tomboy whenever they entered my room, which frankly had done nothing for my sexual awakening. There was a pile of dirty wife-beaters on the floor next to my bed, scattered in a way that suggested they stunk of cheap beer and cheaper cigarettes. I wore a scent called Sunflowers to keep that image from nestling into my mind, which then, post-sleep, had rubbed off onto the sheets and it was like I was sleeping in an entire bouquet.
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My parents had been telling me for weeks that I needed to “lady up my room” before the world of men got the wrong idea about me.
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I do my best to accommodate others. I bought some actual flowers for myself, but they drank the water so quickly, and I didn’t notice, so they died within days.
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I still keep them there, by my bedside. So now people are referring to me as “that goth girl”.
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2.
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I’ll use my finger sometimes, but usually it’s a pencil, when I’m trying to write something and get bored trying and want to feel something and the pencil in my hand has a different feeling than my finger. This usually happens in the mornings, and I like to call this pencil my “morning wood”.
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I always always use the eraser end. I’m not an idiot. I’m just trying to rub one out you see.
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3.
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The little man grew tired of waiting for me and decided to marry a nun named Maria, after he convinced her to give up God for a chance with his “enormous wall hanging” – and we could all guess he wasn’t talking about a Rothko there.
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It didn’t take her long to realize that one didn’t exist either.
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4.
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I want a certain part of me to be in a certain part of you, he said like he was being coy and I didn’t know it. There were blood streaks on the wall in the shape of finger-paint lines a diabolical child might make. The light didn’t do my tan any favors and the mirror in front of me said all the things that were behind me.
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I want you to be the girl I wake up to and have a smoke with every morning, he said like it was something I’d look forward to even though I don’t even smoke. In this room I imagine my mother tutting her teeth at me like some kind of Chinese grandmother. For a few minutes, a tree started to grow on my bed and then withered and stumped.
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I want us to be together as long as I can stand it or until you get fat and ugly which I wouldn’t be able to stand, he said, thinking he was being sweet. He was actually saying things that turn me on. I wouldn’t want to be with an ugly fat girl either and if I let myself get that way, I’d probably want to leave too. Find another body, one that was still pretty and all lady’d up. My eyes popped in the room somewhere in the corner and I saw the floor from the ground up. The sound of hope or reason seemed to be infinitely desolate with the two of us in there, half naked and in a way fatter than any elephant that might have been in there with us.
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5.
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My mom said she got a call from the little man crying about a divorce and begging me to reconsider. It’s of note that he didn’t call me – he called my mother, calling her “Nancy” even though her name is Susan.
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She said he said that there was a major spiritual crisis in his house and he realized that he had stepped into marriage too quickly and for the wrong reasons; that there were items of issue between him and the monkey and the banana; that washing dishes was not for him, but he would work on it, with patience and time.
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I took a few seconds to reconsider the initial consideration under consideration. I grabbed my pencil to write down a list of Pros and Cons.
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I stopped writing the list after two items alone.
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