Sensitive young woman

I don't care about being good. I want to be perfect.

“You are encouraged to play dirty,” announced the game master, “and trust no one.”

The Halloween party I attended last week was a roleplaying game—a Roaring-20s-themed murder mystery. Everyone had an assigned character (i.e., mayor, polo player, English aristocrat, bootlegger, stock broker, bookie, and other high-society archetypes). We all had relations (and secrets) with one another.

Aside from finding the murderer, we each had our own subplots—the singer wanted to dethrone the Hollywood starlet, the tabloid reporter wanted dirt on the millionaire, so on. We were even given play money to extort and bribe and silence and corrupt.

What’s funny about roleplaying is that when people are allowed to be someone else, fiction becomes a license to do what they’ve always wanted. The imagination is more like a mirror than a portal: it’s more reflective of what’s already there than generative of some phantom reality that exists without the need for execution.

All the world’s a stage (Shakespeare stole this line from me)

I figured too many girls would go in that rectangular flapper dress with beaded tassels that swish and sway at the knees, so I chose something softer. Something more romantic, more 𝓭𝓮𝓶𝓾𝓻𝓮. Something that made me look more trustworthy and helpless. I wanted to be Daisy, not Jordan. Persephone, not Artemis. Odette, not Odile.

I chose dusty rose over black, pearls over diamonds, and the perfectly curated facade of a damsel in distress over the dazzling defiance of a new-world feminist. I, a traitor of my kind, am begging to be martyred.

But my favorite accessory of the night? The IRONY. My character, the Musician, was described as “a darling of the swanky speakeasy…a real cool cat…digs talking, but digs listening even more…be sure to eavesdrop, chiming in only when invited.” I’m not sure I needed to act at all for my role. I’m not even sure there was a real person beneath my character.

Sometimes it feels like my whole world might as well be roleplaying. Life is stranger than fiction, so why not treat it like a story? What’s an outfit to a costume? Did you know you can literally wake up in the morning and be the person you want to be? Fiction is never not real, and in this story, I don’t care about being good, I want to be perfect.

I got the blurry candids I asked for

Ironic hedonism

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a lucid, well-adjusted mad mind, must be in want of an audience. How else can she make silly confessions while making it known that she’s aware of the superficiality of it all?

Call me a material girl because this is a material world. It’s that saying, the best things in life are free but the second best are very expensive.

Our capacity for appreciating material things is limited by how much beauty we can find in them. I’ve never understood people who want money for power—I wouldn’t know what to do with that much power even if I had it. I want money because I want beautiful things. I wouldn’t mind being the princess locked up in the tower if the dragon was nice to me and we could collect rare coins and Ceylon sapphires together. Seeking material beauty is an intuition.

(My second favorite accessory that night was the tuxedoed six-foot-one on my left at dinner.)

Sensitive young woman

I want tenderness. I want to collect all the tenderness in the world and bundle it in my arms like a happy farmer hugs a dumb sheep ready for shearing. Everyone wants to be important to someone, the soft underbelly of a beast.

While Brat knows that the world can be brought to its knees by sheer audacity, being a sensitive young woman, in this skin, is a game rigged just enough to make you feel clever for playing. Because how long can you dance on the edge of sincerity without toppling into it? How long before you catch a glimpse of yourself in the audience, watching you write the screenplay of your own life, knowing how little idea you have of what you’re doing?

The sensitive young woman feels the sting of caring too much, but she also knows that the heaviness of not being attached to anything is more detrimental than giving in to naivety and just letting her bright-eyed idealism crash into the wall of worldly wisdom.

Nonchalant?????? I’m chalant af. You think Sylvia Plath could’ve penned Daddy if she hadn’t entertained her conflicting idealization and demonization of her dead father? If she thought herself too cool to care? You think Rachmaninoff could’ve composed that glorious climax in the second movement of his Piano Concerto 2 if he hadn’t let crippling self-doubt shatter him and force him to crawl for the pieces and put himself back together? Caress the details; the devil is found in them but so is the divine.

It is not in my nature to feel in fragments.

Sometimes, I strike up conversations with elderly ladies and gentlemen who have easily lapped my trips around the sun thrice and are not merely white-haired, but white-coated also, even to their eyebrows and lashes. The powdering of time softens all their angularities into curves. This is what I’ve learned from most of those conversations:

You don’t have to dig very deep to find something dearly tragic in someone’s life. I think our human understanding of the full range of emotions is very, very limited—God made us the right amount of stupid to protect us from the sharp pain of tragedy.

If we could sense everything, from the dust falling onto our eyelids in our sleep to the weight of moonlight on our hair, we would collapse. It’s better that we’re dull to certain sensations we would otherwise not be able to bear.

To be a sensitive young woman is to have a soul so observant that no experience escapes it. It’s to be so discerning that knowledge instantly processes into feelings and feelings into words and tweets.

And so, I write things to remember them, to chaperone them into my memory, where they slowly age into compassion. The austerity and asceticism of that quiet place in my mind can turn anything into a story.

~

Thanks for reading,