I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always so frumpy and fragile. I had a man who looked at me, looked real deep into me, like I was more than a washed-up reject from the baby boomer generation. I was a budding and beautiful, intellectually sound, and well-lived young girl with excellent social skills and a broad street knowledge that peaked my practical intelligence at close to genius, at least in the sense that I could navigate my way around any city, and I knew and had been to each Great Lake, and had memorized both the New York and Chicago subway systems, and that I had tasted almost every unique cultural delicacy within the continental United States. This all made me a terribly well rounded individual, almost annoyingly so I’m sure, and also an ideal candidate for a number of men. But after years there has been so much baggage piled on my shoulders that I barely stand up straight anymore. I’m a waning moon, five feet and four inches of dilapidated spirit and rusting skin. I have cauliflower hair and wrinkled lips, a belly that hangs off of me, and varicose veins. I spend every day sitting sadly on this old recliner. It smells like cigarettes and makes my thighs itch through my nightgowns.
On cold nights like these I hide in my mattress, by the window, tracing the city with my fingertips. The lights from the planes fly over the lake and I imagine them plummeting into the buildings and crashing through the Sears Tower. Those images will never leave my mind alone. I sit cross-legged, picking at my cuticle beds and sometimes I can even hear the engines squeal and some of the passengers weep. I sleep to the sound of their panic. It’s not that I take pleasure in their tragedy, it’s just that I wouldn’t dare miss my next interview opportunity. I want to be involved in this world event, to sit in a CBS news chair and talk about the trauma of watching smoke climb the skyline from six miles away. I imagine I’d have a better view from navy pier, where the city looks serene and invincible, where they spin spools of cotton candy and children lick the sugar from their fingertips. Wouldn’t the silence be devastating? Or from the beach! It would be such a strange view from the beach outside my window, four blocks down the road, the one that reminds me of an old wooden puzzle I did over and over again my mother’s basement. It had two sides to every piece, one in which the beach was full of people and pets, kids splashing in water, burying each other in sand, mothers lotioning their backs, and one side where it was barren. I imagine when the plane hit that the people would flee and kick up sand with their feet and all of their umbrellas would sit alone by the water. I would see it all from my bedroom, the pieces slowly turning over until the beach just had footprints and seagulls. Do they interview the seagulls? I’d like to be a seagull who hovers on the lake as the buildings burn, hungry and ignorant, just kind of floating majestically on the water, catching fish in its beak.
