Fractured Light

Speeding up a long afternoon freeway, winter sun glorious and low, rays strobed; daytime shattered by the shadows of ten thousand trees.

She is driving. Set mouth. Day-weary face of freckles and fatigue. Tear-glossed eyes - dry by the grace of G-d(less self-preserving control) - behind large, dark glasses. Music, loud. Very loud.

Picture it ("Sicily, 1933 ..." - no, wait) - music so pulsing the image is made a silent film; even words spoken to herself muted by the utterness of sound; even breath and heartbeat blotted out.

And so, no sound; only thinking.

Thinking of herself on a dancefloor. Imaginary self a stomping Joan Jett wannabe, a black-booted and leather-jeaned stretch of negative space around which everything in the world creates a void. Imaginary self swirling and swirling, the music all a turning, swaying to the sound of the demonic beat ...

She might have become many things.

Somewhere beneath the promise of the girl with a gold locket, she is (still and too) the result of the threat of that out-thrust lip, that early violence and anger, that thing she didn't have to be and half aspired to be, and - almost forgotten - sometimes regrets that she isn't. The bummed cigs and boys' jackets, the always-magenta lipstick, the resentment of her own privilege - ahh, the boys who weren't; the friends who weren't. The girl who hated admitting she went to the preppie school, the rich kids' domains. Could not bear to be one of *them* ...

... and yet never was successfully anything else, either ...

Sometimes ... sorrow is, in us, the most brutish, juvenile rebellion. Sometimes, it is a look into possibilities - who we might have been, when the skin of who we are is so tight that surely it must split and we break free, new and unmade and ready to take shape again.

Sometimes, you have to let the sun strobe to prove it has not died yet, and that you are not in the dark.


And sometimes, you have to listen to deathless music at top volume. And dance; even if only in your head.