The writerly space

Today I cannot wedge myself into the writerly space. It's claustrophobic and surreal to begin with, but if I want to get any clarity of vision or hear the concentrated sounds of reality then I need to get inside. Some days are easier than others. Some days I wake up already feeling the familiar crystal hum and knowing I can pick up the resonances. Today I feel squished and ungainly, pressing and struggling to little avail.

Then there are days when the whole bell jar traps you like a spider. It is disorienting and frightening. Death can do this. 

There are days when the glass is beveled and beautiful, shimmering with rainbows. 

Sometimes it is oddly comforting to have the restricted breathing and fogging warmth of an enclosed space.

I cannot live in the writerly glass jar. It is not an inhabitable space. To be inside the crystal glass is to be separated from others. Writing is, despite being a communicative art, inherently lonely. Reading is the response to the loneliness. 

Edward has green eyes

Less than a year ago I read the Smeyer tetrology of brain-damaging swill known as Twillight, and it has changed my life. The books are an incredible clusterfuck, impossible to plumb in a single post. Smeyer is not to be blamed. She's a bad but eager writer, an avid reader, and a take-no-prisoners capital-M Mother. Bless her, I could and have been Smeyer.
We must not even blame the exploitative publishers who recognized this book as both a 300-year set back to civil rights and the golden goose. Our society demands that they profit in their work and DAMN were they successful!
No, my fine reader, we are the only ones to blame. We are the collective machinery that runs on and demands Smeyer. She would exist anyway, happily scribbling the teenage-angsty fantasies of an over-worked and under-appreciated mom, but it was us who lifted her up in praise. We selected her because she feeds something destructive and cruel within us.
We are Smeyer, and we are legion.

There were many hints in the books, pieces that hurt and wounded me so deeply that they demanded a response, but here is one. Among the reductive and bland descriptions of Edward as a mind-blowingly, pants-shittingly gorgeous super-human, Smeyer mentions off-hand that he once had green eyes.
That wounded me badly.
I began to think to myself, wouldn't those green eyes be more lovely than the caramel-honey-melted-topaz irises he currently has? Those eyes are the stamp of his curse and the mark of his rebellious family, but they are not his own. Edward has green eyes. Who is this creature?
Did he lose his freckles and moles? His chicken-pox scars and the handsome asymmetry of a natural face? Where is the olive-oil glow of summertime skin? The network of blue veins under winter-white skin? What about the identifying irregularities and the idiosyncrisities? Is he a tabula rassa, worshipped for being manifestly vapid?
I had to do something. I couldn't read books in a world where God condemns Edward to oragami-paper skin and unrelenting symmetrical perfection. I had to wrinkle the paper and leave a coffee stain. I had to give Edward back his green eyes.

There were dragonflies

I dropped my groceries on the sidewalk, my self-pity settling between the milk and the peanut butter.
A ten-foot stretch of sidewalk was swarming with dragonflies. They were three inches long, heavy and loud insects dancing around to the insane rattling of the cicadas. I looked around and stepped into the whirlwind, wondering if I might be sucked up or turned into a whizzing insect, but nothing happened. They buzzed and bolted, zipped and even crashed into each other in a sexually aggressive way.
I come from the country, not the city, but finding this little piece of odd nature in Chicago surprised me. It further surprised me that it did not seem to surprise anyone else. No one else seemed to really notice the frenetic cloud of fat bugs, or they shrugged it off as, "Gee, that's a lot of dragonflies."
When I stepped into the cloud of dragonflies I had that sad, clear moment of life which occurs out on the edges where the air is thinner.  I did not cast off my own suffering as false, but I shrugged it off for a moment. For a moment there were only dragonflies, there was only this strange phenomenon happening on someone's lawn next to my forgotten bags.
I am a privileged, middle-class white American woman. I have not known hardship until recently, and I am still often ashamed to count myself among the ranks of those suffering. I am embarrassed to suffer when I have hot running water, access to medication, and enough food for the month in my pantry alone. But I have had to learn that my own pain, while different, is nevertheless real.
The more aware I become of my own suffering, the more I see who is exploiting me or turning me into an object, the more pain I feel. Yet this pain is tinged with a weary understanding of the stories around me, a solidarity with strangers I have yet to meet. My struggle, however weak or superficial-seeming, with depression has nevertheless given me new ears and a new language.
Standing among the dragonflies, cradling a knot of pain somewhere in my body, I felt the dichotomous paradox of being both connected and isolated. The dragonflies exist in a world beyond the veil, a world which I can sometimes visit when I have been wounded or when I have been awed. It is a world that pulls me away from my own self and turns outward, with shared experiences and shared language. It is bittersweet.