What kind of creature am I today?

I paint my personality on my eyes and nails. Today I'm a Rolling Stones' song around the eyes, French royalty at my feet, and a bustling, foul-mouthed yellow cab driver in my hands. Under the nail there is blue flesh and vodka. My lips are rose-petal nymphs, my green eyes are hiding behind Elizabeth Taylor's.

My body is gray gauze, it is a shadow, drifting, a storm cloud. A name I can't remember- a dark thing that hides and loves the night.

I am watching an Elizabeth Taylor film about Beau Brummell. I feel gentle, yet not calm. I have survived another attempt on my life. The body neither forgives nor forgets, young though it is. Scars I smother in vitamin E, the sharp knife twisting in the poor, scarred liver, the pain pills that will only push the pins deeper in.
My slowly narrowing hips and upper arms are bruised and beaten- hardened and swollen with the remnants of substances underneath.

I love anything beautiful, whether it be beautiful in its misery, it's darkness or in its joy and light.

Within my self loathing, there is such self love. An immense love, vast and indulgent. The love one has for an alien creature that fascinates.

Last night I dreamt of cruelty, cabins in the woods, of old, ex-friends  and their hatred, and yet again, of losing my lover, being informed by a third party that he had left me. I searched every cabin and all through the woods, hysterical, and still I could not find him.

I feel peaceful in the quiet and solitude of my own place here, provided I'm well occupied. Otherwise I grow lonely and afraid, and think of Paris, and my little room, my squalid hell, and I wish for pills- little yellow pills. I keep taking my fat doses of prozac, and I manage, I manage and am grateful for it, but it isn't enough, was never enough to merely exist. I want to live, or to be soothed, or to sleep, or to sup mortal ambrosia- opium. (mortal ambrosia! an oxymoron, of course, since ambrosia means immortal). But opium, sweet poppied sleep!

I go back to California and the ironically named Joy, my stepfather's daughter, is always there, a soft soprano voice and ginger hair, widening hips, eating without worry, showering, dressing and sleeping in my childhood home, my family home. She's there more than I am of course. She is making herself my mother's other, better, perfect daughter. C'est vraiment degoulasse. There is such little peace there - the crush of that eternal fucking ceiling of expectation, coming down on me. To acheive, to suceed, to fail and to hide. And the alternative to that shrill bitch downstairs and those expectant, angry, curious parents, is the soi- disant sanctuary of my room. Where I spent my adolescence cutting my arms, burying myself in music, anorexia, books and art, and always howling; howling in rage, and hate and despair.

I do not want to go back there.

So I take my medicine like a good girl, I try to train my lungs to take smoke again, sucking down pink sobranies with salbutamol and becotide. And I hate. I hate the failings of my body. It's nerd disease. Returned childhood asthma and allergies! What next? Braces and orphapedic shoes?

I strung a black silk thread with big, thick crimson beads and made a necklace. I wear a string of red beads wrapped twice around my right wrist. I count calories and numbers on scales. I've lost my favorite ring- the silver with its two ballerina pink crystals. I lose almost everything, I oughtn't to be concerned. Material crap. But I'm not a fucking hippy. I care for material things, they make me happy...happier for a time.

I spent the weekend, while my room mate was slumming it chez sa famille, walking the city streets in sweat and dirty levis, buying fleur de lys bedclothes, autumnal colored scatter pillows, stupid, vacant pretty things. To make this place, this apartment, more beautiful, as if by ammeliorating my surroundings- visually- (and I am a very visual person, obsessed with the aesthetic) I may, some how, improve myself. Make myself beautiful. I want to be beautiful, more than anything, I want to be a great beauty. So I throw my loaned green at cosmetics, make up, clothes and lotions and I stare and stare at the mirror, desperately seeking a beautiful self. I have long since given up on finding my self, myself does not exist. I, like most people, am composed of many selves, each one in conflict with another. I love and despise them all. We tend to idolize those who embody one of our selves. Our heroes live within us, each day emerging, squinting or fainting in the light, dancing for the gathered crowd, spinning, or falling, or leaving. Leaving us to that terrible emptiness, that aches, that writhes in the stomach and chest. My idols, my heroes, each one merely a house- of -mirrors reflection- distorted, often horribly perverse images. My heroes are Edie Sedgewick, Keith Richards, Hunter S. Thompson and Audrey Hepburn.

In Edie there is the excessive love of beauty and extremes, there is dance, despair, starvation, greed, luxury and drugs. In Keith, that wild insouciance, the elegance, the grace and fascination and delight in self destruction. The gloating survivor. In HST, everything, taking life in a fearless, crushing embrace and squeezing, sucking, shooting, snorting and swallowing it dry. Cheating death, cheating the body, cheating the system, not only breaking the rules, but utterly destroying them. And finally, in the sharpest of contrasts to the rest, the quiet determination of Audrey, a creature refined, appearing so cigarette thin, so frighteningly fragile and yet work horse strong, so strong she survived a war, near starvation, and poverty to stride to artistic success and glory. And brilliant, graceful, compassionate, and so full of love.

All these selves contained in me. The self that hates, the self that trembles, breaking just like a little girl, the ephemeral self winking in a rare moment of pure beauty, then the rebel, noisy, violent, the destructive self, and the fearless self, smashing up its world and creating its own, anew, and now and then, the self that swoons, tender, gentle, sensitive and loves and loves until it aches.