04/02/14

keyframe
n. a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life—set in motion not by a series of jolting epiphanies but by tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next, until entire years of your memory can be compressed into a handful of indelible images—which prevents you from rewinding the past, but allows you to move forward without endless buffering.



I'm going dress shopping in different stores but everything looks stupid or is in a size completely incompatible with my body. Mom keeps running in after me, pissed off and waving a bottle of maple syrup at me, while I try to keep Arianna from seeing by pointing at stud-covered boots. Bad Christian music is playing and I make a joke about it--Arianna laughs, but I worry she is thinking I am mocking all of Christianity. No! Just the music. Just this stupid music.

I am Dr. Cox, beaten and bloody with my son in the doctor's office. I am defeated and worn and breaking and I do not know how to be vulnerable enough to tell my partners. Jordan and another girl in a green dress--green dress is newer and more headstrong about us but that might just be the newness of us making her seem so strong. Jordan is forever beautiful in the background but is she strong for me or just worn out like me and withdrawn? They come in, and green dress girl goes to a stranger's kid a coos over him, asking if she can take him home and begins going around collecting every kid she can see in her arms--every kid except for ours, Jack. Jordan steps in the room and scoops up Jack and stands across the room, meeting my eyes and I instantly see that she knows something is so wrong so very, very wrong with me but she is going to wait until we are alone to talk about it. For now she is just going to stand here and hold the world together until we can fall apart together.

I am on an island with six other cartoons and we need to start thinking about finding a food supply. I give them buckets and they start scooping the sand beneath the water and dumping it on our tinytinytiny island for me to sift through and find crabs but I see that they are destroying the small base of land we have and soon we will have no island at all. I am shrieking at them to stop but they are singing cartoon songs and loosening the base of the island and I know we are going to die and it will be my fault.

Awaken.