I will probably never write more on this or create a stand-alone story for it, but I thought I’d share anyway. Hope you like it.
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Gravity hurts. Having the air knocked out of your lungs, feeling your chest heave with the force of the impact, and experiencing that outer body moment as you kind of watch yourself fall down. Hard and fast but also slow all within the same fragment of a second. And then you blink…that’s when you hit the ground. That’s when life begins again.
I should backtrack to before I lay sprawled across the pavement to the second I realize my insignificance or better yet the depth of my stupidity. Never had I considered the notion of being naïve. Not even the time when I was twelve and my father announced he was leaving to be with his new found same-sex lover, not even when I walked in on my mother having sex with my uncle, not even the time I found out my fourteen year old sister was pregnant from my boyfriend. The idea of these situations being more – more than lies, more than outspokenness, more than painful, more than plain ol’ sex – had never even entered my mind. All that I could think about was how much my father hurt my mother’s pride by leaving us for her hair stylist named Vergil. All that was going through my mind while I stared at my mother humping my uncle was how disgusting their actions were. All I could grasp was how people were going to gossip about my slut of a sister sleeping with my boyfriend. Never did I in those moments – and the moments that followed after – think about the why.
Logic would indicate that everything has a reason: that everything has an underlying motive behind it.
In this non-conventional place of all places, the realization finally dawned on me. Sitting on the toilet I read the message, in purple marker written on the bathroom stall, about Cindy Lauren being bisexual. All I could think about was how this affected me. Cindy Lauren slept over my house. Cindy Lauren had been my friend since middle school. Cindy Lauren was bisexual and we were connected to by the hip. This would translate to me being her closet lesbian lover. Word would spread like wildfire – if it hadn’t done so already – and I would be in the mouth of everyone in this school by the time lunch rolled around.
Long story short…all I could think about was how Cindy Lauren’s sexual preference decision was fucking my life over. Because as an anomie of society that was the way I was accustomed to responding. I was shooting her down for her choices – no – it wasn’t her choices that I was shooting down. Cindy was going against the norm – just like my father, mother, uncle, sister, and boyfriend – and that was why she had to be degraded to someone who was worth less than dirt.
And that’s when it happened. With my panties around my knees, the earth shook under my feet and I was slapped in the face with what I can only imagine to be a cold dead fish. After that there was nothing. Silence. My mouth hung open as my eyes fixated themselves in a singular spot without falter; all the while my mind had begun doing cartwheels.
I, Arianna Tabb, am nothing but a string-along puppet for society.
I, Arianna Tabb, am nothing.
