Autoportrait

End of summer existentialisms courtesy of Jesse Ball

It must pay to be clever but it might pay more to be kind. Some days I don’t think it pays at all, so most days I try to be everything at once. I believe if I was locked in a room and forced to stay in there until I learned to do a backflip, I would succeed in less than forty-eight hours, but only if I was given a snack every once in a while. I like to listen to music too loud, especially when it disturbs others. One of my favorite things to do is get my hair cut. I like to watch my dead ends get thrown in someone else’s garbage can. I think one of the bravest things a person can do is refuse to move. When I’m in my bed I wonder if we really do sleep when we’re dead, or if the afterlife is more exciting than that. Maybe we all play limbo. Maybe we all wear robes. Maybe there’s a punch bowl. I try not to use the phrase “too good to be true” because I think plenty of good things can be true. I think people are the only thing that get in the way of this. When I was little, I began to convince myself that if the good isn’t bad, it must become bad when it ends. I’m unlearning this because I haven’t enjoyed a lot of good things when I had them. And all good things must end. I cried on the first day of first grade, and the second day of first grade, and the first day of second grade. I’m older now and I still cry like a child — at things like dead dragonflies and Christmas trees in dumpsters. When an ER doctor tried to set my broken fibula I only balled my fists. I always made friends with the classmates I stood next to in the lunch-line, the ones that had the same last initial as me. In this, I learned that some girls have dead sisters that drowned in swimming pools when their age was small enough to be counted on one hand. I’ve been scared for twenty-one years and I think we should talk about the things that scare us. I’ll go first to be brave and not a hypocrite. My biggest fear, some days, is that I’m stupid. But since I know, deep down, that I’m not stupid, most of the time my biggest fear is that other people think I’m stupid. Some days I’m not scared at all though, and on those days I want to be the thing that is scary. Every Halloween, a friend of my parents would take out his glass eye and let the neighborhood kids roll it around between our palms. When this happened I wouldn’t look at the eye but the lack of it in his face. I was scared of haunted houses until I decided to love them. I’ve seen houses burn that were only accessible by boat, which is ironic. I think one of the smartest things anyone has ever said is, “If you are smiling, then you are the master of yourself.” I’m good at smiling and bad at lying and I think these two things must be related. One of my old boyfriends kept Cuban cigars in his treehouse and consumed them as if they were rationed flour during wartime. His parents bought them in Havana. They flew there from Canada because they said it easier that way. They couldn’t tip the waitresses there, which they found to be both unfair and unkind because they were beautiful, soft-spoken, and perceived to be helpless against their own circumstances. When they told me this I pictured them in my mind and felt jealous, the same way I am jealous of celebrities, which I now know is something called ignorance. My least favorite thing is being inside on a sunny day. I’ve been called a witch more than once and I’m sure I’ve been called more sinister things without my knowledge. When I’m being mean to myself I feel like the person people see when they don’t recognize their own face in the mirror. One of the worst things I’ve ever seen was a hyperventilating beagle with a fish hook looped in its mouth, but the sound it made was worse. I’ve seen so many rainbows in my life that I wish I would have counted them. I have seen four shooting stars. If the aliens came to Earth not in peace, I would convince them of humankind’s goodness through tap shoes, tandem bicycles, and waffle makers. I’ve never seen a tornado. I’ve seen rain so thick it took out windshields. I’ve seen useless organs removed from the caverns of my body and placed in specimen jars. I’ve seen endless combinations of words on paper. I love scavenger hunts. I try not to disclose my hiding places. I like the idea of large parties and the execution of small ones. I hate the idea of water shoes. I have a habit of making a martyr of myself. In my first self portrait I drew myself with tears on my cheeks. Since then I’ve tried to grow out of it.