Fire-eater

smears

I used to live in Harrisonburg, VA. I stuck around for almost four years. It was a good thing, the mountains. Celebrating my geographic relief from Indiana, I had an old Nissan truck, a lot of unleaded and my dog, Maya. I had a favorite place in the mountains off an old, unmarked logging road that the plumes of fern and mossy vegetation of the Alleghenies frame the way only they can. The soundtrack is the crackle your cigarette makes in a silent Appalachian nightfall and in a few more minutes, mourning doves, confused by fire-light, the loud swish of a tipped wine bottle or hatchet sounds. Coos of running fox as you sleep.

When I worked at the Little Grill Collective, I got to meet and get to know many locals and travelers alike, more than a few great characters, artists and tradesman of the hodgepodge variety, and talkative coffee friends. The folks in town I didn’t speak to still regularly moved and wove through my meditations and became a fabric, a familiarity, either real or projected, that was comforting to me.

One image to ponder who regularly passed through the picture-window-frame of the Grill was a woman, of maybe thirty four or thirty six. She never came in. She dressed recurrently in dark layers of denim and other tough fabrics, and an army backpack. She looked straight ahead as she walked and a silence followed her attentively. Her face was smeared with makeup in a clown-like caricature, red lipstick askew in an asymmetrical mockery and eyes a bright, alert blue exaggerated by thick-caked black, running down cheek bones that were, in contrast, set high, nobly and with great care. Thick, ample locks of brunette twisted into snakes with a gray of clay-like consistency. When I asked of her circumstances, I was told that ten years or so prior, she was attacked and sexually assaulted by two men as she walked late at night. That her frequent late-night route or other external factors were things that she did not alter, but rather her appearance, preoccupied me.

I heard her speak at the counter of the convenience store once, and then again thirty seconds after that, as I held open the door as she passed through, making brief eye contact with me and whispering “thanks”. I couldn’t tell if she smiled inside her mask or not, but I did, I think. Some would have taken a self-defense course or bought a dog. Went to therapy or bought a gun. Become hateful. She changed her face.

I had my second therapy session on Monday morning, the first being a more introductory affair, filled with who, what, where and when, but too soon for a why. The second was more open-ended and oceanic and for whatever reason, this woman came to mind as I thought. The appearance that Jung and Ouspensky seemed to unanimously outvote Freud on the bookshelf I was staring at must have reassured me, and my internal dialogue cracked at first, then resonated through the little room.

How do we change and twist our faces? In what way do we all internalize our hurt, anger and disappointment into something that alters our inherent attractiveness and beauty(dare I say divinity)? Does this impede our ability to love? How do our voices and words become mere whispers? What could happen if we didn’t hide and reserve? What could happen if we ask these questions openly and together?

I’m finishing moving today, and as I pack into boxes the notebooks, pulp novels, diatribes, acrylic-conte crayon scratchings and old, thick cloth-bound books I frequently retreat into, I’ll be sure and ask myself all of this and more. That is, if I can hear myself over Modest Mouse. There’s always next Monday.

Isn’t there?

wds