Storms in my stomach
What wicked storms we can't touch.
Lines from about a week ago I toyed with today:
My mom trimmed the back of my hair this morning with scissors from her sewing kit, though she doesn't actually sew. It's a compulsory belonging, like a first-aid kit, something she figures out if there’s an accident. I sat at the table where we just finished breakfast (eggs, toast); she stood behind me and her boyfriend sat in the chair next to me. Naturally, we discussed haircuts. He told us how he used to want a big perm, and I said it's still possible yeno, my friend has a perm; and, she used to have a perm in high school, referring to my mom, though of course I didn't know her then. I met her with long, somewhat wavy, blonde hair, and soon after that she cut it. Her hair thereafter entered limbo, somewhere in between a pixie cut and a short bob, much like the way I wear my hair now.
My mom's boyfriend talks like a paired down character from Letterkenny, with a rural New Hampshire accent found among farm hands and self-proclaimed rednecks. He invariably drinks Coors Light (the tastiest beer in the whole world, according to him), wears steel-toe boots, and likes his steak well-done. I once convinced him to buy cowboy boots in a camp way, except when he wears them they look wildly earnest. He says now he has a cop cut, a clean-cut look, and he says it with some remorse. How unfortunate to resemble a pig […silence]… I like more scraggly looks. That's why I like dogs that look like mops, and why I don’t mind my mom cutting my hair with baby scissors that don't always cut in one go. Sometimes it takes a few hacks before the blades finally close, but I think the zags add character.
We drove through a thunderstorm yesterday, which reminded me how much I love them. They make me feel safe, closed in, protected. The threat of weather feels clear, transparent, predictable, though I'm only really familiar with thunderstorms and blizzards, neither particularly destructive – at worst, a few carved-out roads, a handful of fallen trees and power lines, or a collapsed embankment. They're just something unordinary to shake things up, a beautiful wrench in such a relentless cog, as long as they exist behind a clearly defined parameter (ie. the window of my bathroom, the walls of my apartment, eight hours before school starts so they can safely call a snow day). Sometimes storms stir in my stomach, and this unnerves me: when the shield of armor turns. They make me feel sick and I wish I could puke them up. One can imagine such a barf; it would unleash a tremendous tornado, the vortex being my wide open mouth. I'd spit and spur and afterward finally feel at ease, though probably a bit wiped with some kind of cosmic hangover.
Loss or impending loss upsets my stomach the most, big griefs and little griefs, headline-type grief that mourns the death of basic comfort and safety and security in America – or the illusion of it, since those are things most people have never really had – and personal griefs as small as a beloved mug that smashes on a linoleum floor and shatters into a million pieces. I like to pick up a broken piece in its memory and place it somewhere like on top of my dresser, because after all it was hardly the function of this metaphorical mug that I loved, but the sentimental value I imbued it with. I believe that value still exists in a shard.
The big griefs, though, mourn vital functions lost. The function of a grocery store and a school and a medical center. The function of the right to make decisions about one's own body. The function of a sense of security. A broken heart mourns lost possibility; it makes you sick with wonder about a person or a relationship or a future. If you are someone who falls in love everyday, perhaps with the person sitting across from you on the T, the person guiding your walking tour of the Freedom Trail, even someone you stir up conversation with at a party, well you mourn lives unlived everyday. There is no piece to pick up from such big things, nothing to hold close to your body. What wicked storms we can't touch, that only turn stomachs and perhaps make us scream.
When I feel any strong concoction of emotion, my stomach stirs. I've heard these storms are best weathered with others, though right now I’m alone, subject to both thunder and loss, cutting even more hair over a dirty sink, even more bleached chunks falling, even more zags to behold.
this is beautiful, Althea. The last three paragraphs </3