Dress Sizes

I enjoy the overstuffed Laura Ashley chinch cushions scattered carelessly around my cerebral office, like a cup of Joe on the go, so is my office. An anywhere room to retreat to, make notes in, to take comfort in, to sip Coppla’s Claret from cut crystal wine glasses, as needed.  I purposely decorated the virtual Room of my Own to resemble the real one—it reduced my bank balance by eighty thousand dollars and the single biggest purchase in my vast, and color-tainted life—because the physical room is the gateway to me.  It’s where my girl and boy collect.   ‘Mommy, can I?  Where are my…? Do you know..?  I need twenty dollars.  Do you have a book called Wuthering Heights?’  I wonder if the eighty thousand was wasted.

Before writing my stories down, I retreated inward and watched the plays and movies I wrote and directed on the wide screen in my head.  It’s where I found pleasure, and took refuge when the white noise was defeating.  It didn’t occur to me that I was writing virtual stories, nor did it occur to me I was in the minority.  Until reaching college, I just assumed others had a secret chamber in their heads, and watched self produced plays and movie like I would do. I assumed all the houses on my block were bursting with music, had a father that sang along with Eddie Fisher, and Pat Boone, spouted The Raven, read passages from Of Human Bondage, and a mother that favored two fingers of Johnny Walked Blue-label over ice in a highball glass.

The moment of awareness came in front of a college English teacher who passed on the virtual untamed English garden in my head and opted to hatchet it and I instead.  My skin pink and tender, the heart scotch taped to my sleeve were weak armor against her callous mutterings.   She didn’t understand me, and since her words hinted unstable, I bolted and chained the imaginary room shut, hid the key, stopped the climb into my head for comfort, and turned to books.

My parents I couldn’t hide from the outside world, and since surviving weird parents earns instant respect from peers, I didn’t need worry.  But the room in my head, well that wasn’t anything I need to advertise, and if I did, I’d never get that end of a date kiss.  Reading was like pain management is to an amputee—I’d read to deny the absent room, telling myself it wasn’t there and those voices I heard out of the mouths of those people who did not exist in those places that were vivid and alive was like that phantom leg pain—real, but not there.

The room remained hidden, and I had almost convinced myself it was a figment of my non-existent imagination, and those voices that cooed in my ear was the wind trapped in my head.  The dreams I had were movies I had seen once, and those stories were from books I couldn’t remember the names of, and those half-remembered conversations, all hazy memories I convinced myself.   The mind is powerful if trained, but the body follows its own drummer. The voices in my head were words clogging up my thoughts, and if I had one spare word in my head now, I’d tell you how they revolted and my body spit them out and said in surround sound—ENOUGH!  Let these words out, let them play together, make sand castles, build bridges, anything they want, but get them out of here…