jolie laide

jolie laide

I started this when I lived in Brooklyn and struggled for grace in a city that grants moments of beauty and ugliness breathtakingly close to one another. Now I live in a place where things are a different kind of ugly and the beauty is pedestrian. I struggle with that.

10.27.2006

On this train noone is telling me a story. The girl across from me, her face is closed down to two vertical lines between her eyebrows and I wonder if she is in pain. That man with the sunken face is staring blankly, unblinking. I look at the girl next to me and she shifts her book away from me to keep me from thieving a read, but it’s a book I’ve read already, a book I own.

So I think about my friends, how they tell the stories of themselves, how they illuminate their childhood selves like a flash bulb going off in the dark revealing for a single awesome moment the bottom of a tiny pink foot, the small hand clutching the suitcase handle, the spinning spinning and falling into the grass drunk on joy.

2 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I associate with these people - crushed by the weight of the world

how long can you go on telling your story when nobody is listening

1:45 PM  
Blogger ttractor said...

I hope that the people I was looking at were only having a bad moment or a bad day, not terminally miserable. And I hope my looking at them feels compassionate, if noticed, and not a cold vivisection.

I work every day to try to make the world less crushing for those who are most vulnerable, it's my job. I associate with them, and in response I try to find beauty in the forgotten, overlooked.

That is how I continue. I don't know any other way.

11:27 AM  

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