Fairy Tale Tragedies
Why endeavor to relate the gorgeous tragedies of my big-girl fairy tale life? Sure it’s cathartic, but there is more to it than that.
It’s sick, really. I take a section of my life that was maybe kinda wonderful but mostly morose and twisted, and I package it up neatly. I contain it, you know? I get to decide how the story is told.
It’s always something to do with some guy who I think is great, who’s shmuck-hood steadily develops, first crossing the threshold of total A-hole status, then stepping fully inside prick-dom and closing the door behind. See? I just did it again. A neat little package. A beginning, some bullshit, and an end.
And I seem especially driven to transform the events of these ordeals into actual fairy
tales. I entertain myself by renaming these guys with ridiculous titles. ‘I dub thee Sir Drinks-a-lot, and I bid thee to leave embarrassing early-morning messages on my voicemail, that may become my ammunition for vengeful humiliation. I shake my head at thee. Now go, and prosper with whatever sad-sack of a slut will put up with you’. See, it makes it more fun when I make fun of it.
Maybe that’s what these late-night, wine-induced, emotionally editorial tirades are all about. I write the stories OVER my life. I’m not afflicted, no. I’ve just been gathering material.
I’ve always done it. I used to deliver my diary a good battering whenever someone did me wrong. At that age they were secret expressions, though. But now I’m a big girl, and I’m allowed to talk about all these things. You know, like rage, and sex, and mischief. Nobody’s gonna send my mom a concerned letter regarding possible depression or high-risk behavior, not anymore.
Sometimes I read through that old diary. It’s like I’m reading about someone else, and I guess I am. The entries are more detailed, like I’m telling a girlfriend some juicy story, or memorializing a night of heavy petting, and I don’t want to leave anything out, because it is all … totally … revolutionary.
That old diary holds a lot of sadness too. Actually, it’s pretty dismal and helpless. There is an inability to understand splashed all over those pages, pervading everything, and I feel bad for her.
Now, when I think about those snipits of my life, I adopt this removed, satirical attitude about what the experience did to me, and meant to me. Hindsight is 20/20, or whatever, and now I get it. Because now I don’t feel it anymore in my chest. I don’t get that crushing, hard to swallow feeling anymore.
Now I just write it down, and wrap it up, in a neat little package. I contain it, so it can’t hold me, ever again.