I’m hiding from myself in my room with the ceiling fan for company. Summer’s heat has beaten me, accompanied by stomach pains and petulant ennui. I read this morning that there were flood warnings in Madison; just sixteen miles up the road the blessed rain fell for minutes at a time, causing motorists to forget themselves all over again, as if it were December, as if it were snow.
Here it sunned and continued its drying lag. I could have fried an egg, perhaps a side of bacon, and some toast on the hood of my car and served breakfast to the neighbors.
My youngest daughter asked to read a Disney version of Snow White, and I couldn’t help but think of it as a story written by the teenage girl about the injustices she was forced to endure. We’re taught to sympathize, but what if instead Snow White ran away, and, found by the cops, she wove a deep, and troubling tale–a wicked queen, coveting Snow White’s pure beauty; a death threat; a poison apple; seven strange little men in a hovel in the deep, dark wood.There are always two sides to every story, after all.
I’m turning into a wicked queen. Negativity fumes from me like noxious green gas. It’s possible that I am divided so completely in half (with a charged electric fence and barbed wire) that one side believes beyond absolute certainty in the possibility of all outcomes, while the other half sits in blatant consternation, bubbling away in horrifying anxiety.
Last Saturday I ran an open mic, but an hour before standing up at the microphone I took a prescribed dose of beta blockers. The banishment of anxiety was atypical, especially before an event I planned, and I felt a rare calm spread from my core outward. Relief.
I could live in that calm, cool world without anxiety, but would my drive to do and be and create disperse as well or would I become more centered, tear down the electric barricade and unite the two countries implacably at war?
“We’ll see,” Ma says. We shall indeed.