I like grapefruit or orange juice with handfuls of ice cubes. I like old VWs and new Bugattis. I have a traveler's heart but the head of a tree stump and will hardly move unless you light me on fire. I like handbags. Big bags mainly so I can carry lots of things. Like a pear and a good book and my library card and the one for Mountain equipment, too and sometimes a sweater, but only if it's cool. Every pocket also contains a bobby pin, sometimes two, and you'll find two or three more in my hair if you look hard enough.
I don't like shoes but I have a few pairs that stand out. Shoes with skulls or angels and cowboy boots in unconventional colors.
I like the inside of my brain and have never said out loud that I was bored. Ever. I can go anywhere inside my head, with no fear of the unknown. If it's unknown I can simply reimagine it to be perfect. I love wooden hair brushes and men in white button-down shirts and I like cotton candy. I love the thrill rides at the fair but only at sundown and I will never jump out of plane again because I figure I have already beaten the odds by surviving the first jump. I like pasta al dente and trying new foods and surprise get-togethers. I love growing ivy in my north-facing kitchen window and I love bath bombs from Lush, the sex bomb the most. I've been in love with Brigitte Bardot since I first laid eyes on her and Naomi Watts too. I get crushes on some unlikely fellows as well but the list is too long and you would proclaim I am bored and move on to someone else's words. Let's just say some of them might surprise you and others will downright scare you. I don't care what they've done, be good now. I don't judge people except based on how they treat me.
I love music. Not all music. I'm not prone to fits of ecstasy over country music, pop, or slow chamber orchestras, but if it's loud and qualifies as any kind of metal I am there with bells on. I can bang my head in the car at stoplights or dance under my seatbelt and make people smile. I'll wave because I don't care. I wish I could get real fruit juice in my slurpee and I wish bubble tea came without bubbles. I like pocky sticks and red strings and drawings of the hand of fatima because I think the hand means stop! You will have good luck from here on out. I'm superstitious and I carry a rabbit's foot everywhere I go. A St.Christopher's medal and an evil eye too. A keychain that says Princess. That's me.
I like farms, I like the smell, the work and the taste of vegetables fresh from the garden. I like old telephones and having to walk to the post office and the bed that everyone falls into the middle of and the wood-burning kitchen stove. I like the animals though they are always bigger than me and I liked the noise from the sawmill nearby because it meant everything was right with the world. I liked daylight there. Crickets make me terribly sad so let's focus on sunflowers which do not.
I can boil the perfect four-minute egg. The yolk is soft and moist and a rich yellow. I can also bake a banana bread that won't last twenty-four hours and I have had five difference cellphones in the past three years because if it lights up and fits in my hand I'm happier than if you give me diamonds.
I could live out of a backpack. The simpler things in life drawn me in. Hanging laundry to dry. Cooking raw. Drawing. Reading a book by candlelight. Music played around the living room or the dining room table. Smiling. If you see me out you would think I'm a fool because I wear a smile and I ask people how they are, because I used to be a scowling-troll and now I don't see the point in not Making Contact. I don't waste a lot of precious time on self-help or on risking my life when I feel like, here at halfway through, a quiet existence forgotten in a city of hundreds of thousands of people is possibly where I belong but I will always be somewhere else, someone else, inside my head.
