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bluecastleIt is a truth universally acknowledged that real life is never as neat and tidy as it is in the movies. But, you can’t keep a girl from hoping…
Maisie realized one day that she’d been hiding her whole life – in the tops of trees, between the pages of books, in the back of darkened theaters. Watching other people live lives that seemed so much more exciting than her own.
I’m sorry… I know I shouldn’t be here. There’s an open door in front of me, but I can’t walk through it. I don’t belong there. Everything depends on staying here safe in the darkness…except the darkness is never really safe…
I woke up suddenly, trapped by my sweaty sheets, and bathed in the light flickering from the TV that is always on. I hate dreams that leave you breathless and alone in the middle of the night.
Half awake and mumbling curses, I fight my way out of the tangled sheets and grope around my headboard looking for my glasses. I find all the things I don’t want… toenail clippers, Chapstick, a teddy bear’s leg, used Kleenex… but finally my fingers find what they are looking for. I always wonder how fast I could find my lifeline if there was an emergency. Certainly I wouldn’t get very far without them. Not that they’re doing me much good here in the middle of the night. I am barely awake and hardly able to see straight even with my glasses, which I realize as I stumble over dirty laundry and an odd discarded sneaker in the hallway on my way to the bathroom.
I use the bathroom, wash my hands, and splash some water on my face and the back of my neck. Ignoring my cat, who has come from who-knows-where to sit in the bathtub and stare at me, who-knows-why, I wander into the kitchen for something to drink. A sensible person would get a cold glass of water, or some warm milk, or a hot cup of tea. But I never claimed to be sensible. So here I am standing in my kitchen at four-thirty in the morning drinking diet Pepsi and wondering if God hates me for wanting to eat cookies in the middle of the night.
The “you live alone, you can do anything you like” mythos has never really worked for me. I don’t drink milk straight out of the carton, I don’t eat crackers in bed, or any of those other lies they tell about the independent single apartment dweller. Not that I wouldn’t like to… but those scenes of the independent girl with great hair arriving home in the middle of the night to stand in front of the refrigerator ignoring the leftover Chinese food and swigging orange juice from the container just don’t exist here in reality land. In reality land, the girl is far from independent, has terrible hair, and if she tried to drink straight out of a container from the fridge, all the liquid would glop out and run down her neck. Trust me. Also, the Chinese food would not be ignored…
Plus, in reality land, if you snack in bed and leave it full of crumbs, there’s no kindly housekeeper – say, perhaps, played by Whoopi Goldberg (complete with costume borrowed from Donna Reed) to pick Mallomar crumbs out of your bed and fluff your pillows*. A bit of advice -- when you live alone and are disinclined to clean -- eat the crumbly stuff while sitting on the couch. It’s easier to dislodge the crumbs into the spaces between the cushions.
(*see Corrina, Corrina.) (No, really, see it, it’s a good movie.)
In that fictional land of Myth-issippi, the kindly housekeeper gets her lovely blue convertible and takes you out to the drive-in restaurant for pecan waffles (*ibid). In reality-ville, you find yourself sitting on crumbling couch cushions eating generic two-tone sandwich cookies and hoping to find either a good movie or a fun infomercial on the TV. You will find neither. What will happen is that the remnants of your bad dream will keep you up watching dreadful TV, and you will drop off to sleep on the couch about 30 seconds before your alarm goes off, sleep through it, and wake up late for work. Hence, your bad night has become an equally bad day.
