Fifth place winner of Poetry to
Prose Contest, written by
MarionBelleKnight

Encumbered Valentine

Today, Annabelle and I tried to reclaim the taste of our old magic friendship. I know Annabelle misses it too, but there it is: beginning, middle and end. Our mirrored emptiness.

The ease of summer has passed. Annabelle is harder to get to. My home makes her uncomfortable, and I could go into why and the way she avoids it, and how that hurts- but I am willing to allow her a layer of grace in all of this.

The freeway entrance is closed. The roads through the inner south of the city loop through neighborhoods and contrived coffee joints and hipster restaurant fad-popups. And I take one wrong turn after another.

I know Annabelle is waiting, and I hate making her wait - but of course the feeling of waiting is deeper, it's grey and long and empty just like me and Annabelle, and Annabelle and I feel it together.

I drive to her through more endless neighborhoods, and then there is parallel parking, which never goes well.

But then there she is in her smart jacket and age appropriate clothing sitting in the sun, waiting for me, smiling and "Oh it's okay and it's alright - let's just go across the street."

Annabelle order's soup. I order curry, and there are some lovely fried cream cheese wantons. She order's tea because that is what Annabelle does at Thai restaurants. We have boring conversations.

A fat grey cat walks by our window seat, so I point him out. He saunters down the busy sidewalk of Applewood with the confidence of an entitled sixty-five-year-old white male. He just strolls his cat-like stroll, and I want to tell Annabelle about how I think in his world he is wears a preposterously dapper suit and tie and there must be a smart cane involved with a fashionable embellishment at the top.

My mind wanders over this cat like it has been wondering over many objects lately. For a moment I am caught in my view of Applewood with all its cloistered cute shops- a neighborhood of Pinterest pastiche. There is an entitled shallowness to it that I have become disillusioned by. Fake. Money. Money recreating authenticity. Fake. Fake. So Fake. So much fucking fakery. Yoga studios and teashops and vintage stores and shops in cottages and massage and little modern studios and only the most adorable of food carts - old fashioned movie theater. Perfect tableau.

Between the cat and Applewood I think about the movie: My Fair Lady - which is based on a Greek myth called Pygmalian - about a sculptor who creates the perfect woman and is blessed when she is brought to life.

My favorite part of My Fair Lady is the part where the old man - who plays the role of the sculptor suddenly breaks into song along the streets of New York. No one remembers this part of the movie - it's awful. He sings "Thank God for little girls" The scene is hilarious, and so completely uncomfortable. An old man ogling a choruses of little girls while singing "Thank God..." Imagine a pedophile musical. It's so ridiculous it's absurd. And I imagine our cat the grey cat as the old man, singing in his arrogant untitled way. "Thank God for Pussy."

Oh, the pastiche of our dreary afternoon. I can't tell Annabelle any of the many things I am thinking. So instead I say, "Oh, look at that fat cat," and Annabelle giggles with me, and I love her because there are always two conversations: The one inside and the one on the outside.

My brain is very much like a cat, a fat entitled hungry cat - oblivious sluggish cat, leery wary brain-pet. My brain pet likes Annabelle, and so it is okay if the real Annabelle seems so far away.

The cat disappears past our window, and I am back with Annabelle and our food and Annabelle talking about the vacation she gets to take. She sounds resigned, while I sound bitter, there is the crust of that along all our sentences - fucking volcanic ash.

Annabelle wears a yellow blouse and white sweater, all Anne Taylor. Too much Anne Taylor - I wish I could take her somewhere and dress her in something different. Smart, sensible, middle-class, adult - perfectly respectable, educated 32-year-old woman Anne Taylor.

In contrast I still dress like a lost girl, a girl who hasn't quite decided what she wants to be. I am too old for this look. Really it is Annabelle who should take me to Anne Taylor.

Today I am in baggy, grey cigarette jeans, knee-high riding boots and maroon sweatshirt - embroidered in block white lettering with the word LOVE. "Love Protect Me. I am protected by Love. I walk through the fire of Love and Love Prevails. Love. Love. Love." It would look better on a tan sorority girl.

But for me. "LOVE. Love protect me. I am protected by love. Beginning. Middle. End."

Annabelle point's out my thinness - which wouldn't be noticeable to anyone else - because I am now average size instead of plump, which feels like complacency, evidence of an inner starvation, and not transformation.

Annabelle and I eat, and the two women, who are seated next to us, prattle on about white privilege like they are the experts because they send money to Uganda to build wells. They are seated too close, and I contemplate competing with them for the more interesting conversation. But the truth is that Annabelle and I always can have the more interesting conversation. Theirs is lousy anyways. Righteous. Awkwardly condescending. I think of my awful sister-in-law, who was publicly accused of being a well-meaning, white feminist pushing a white feminist agenda, blind to her own entitled heteronormative cis-gendered privilege.

Neither one of us want to have one of our provocative conversations in front of these bougie zealots. Fuck the patriarchy. Fuck talking about racism. Fuck white angels brought down on high to step into their rightful place at the center of the hero's journey. Fuck it all and everyone and everything..... And the grey consuming void which surrounds vapid conversations.

Poverty has its own seduction. Food tastes better, love feels sharper... In poverty everything is made decadent, from heat to food to friendship to romance.

There is a part of me which wonders if Annabelle has been desensitized by wealth, made complacent by virtue.

Today, - the void has followed us. The dreary cloud of biological purpose and societal constructs and Annabelle and I and our ever-spreading continental shift.

We pay and walk to my car. The grey cat is waiting for us. Even fatter and more arrogant. I quietly name him Mr. Pygmalian, and then wonder what Annabelle would think of the second conversation I am having in my head.

Someday she will believe me when I tell her I think I might be crazy.

We drive to the park where earlier in the year we had shared our first kiss on bleachers so ironically placed in front a little league baseball diamond. Neither one of us can look. I find myself wishing I could hold Annabelle's hand; our bodies keep bumping together. Her weight feels good and warm and solid, just gently knocking against mine. Not purposeful. Just consequential.

Annabelle and I walk past a metal donut of a sculpture - and Annabelle points it out as an artifact of her childhood, she describes a picture of her in front of it from long ago. I can see Annabelle as a little girl. I can see her child, and her child's child -all living in permutations of Birth. Youth Marriage. Parenthood. Grandparents. Retirement. Funeral. Again. They all take a picture. And the picture is sentimental. Then the picture is artifactual. And Annabelle don't matter anymore than her clothes do - and this is just if the picture survives.

There is a part of me that wants to give Annabelle the Applewood house. The picket fences. The babies. But Annabelle has already found this with a man she loves, and I will always be a lost girl. And the time of lost girls has passed.

And Annabelle deep down is a lot more heteronormative, cis gendered/ whatever the politically correct term is for Annabelle- well-meaning, guilty, white liberal, 3rd wave feminist.

I can see Annabelle in 5 years. Here in this park with her babies and her husband and their little puppies. She will have endless homemade Martha Stewart snacks. Beautiful, articulate pastries with the artistry of a dreamer's volcanic ash. Annabelle will be the mom other moms will envy - others will think she has her shit together. And Annabelle will, but let's be clear; I know the secret of her: The secret of her, will be wasted in a conventional narrative. Of soccer games and bake sales and a compliant sex life.

I find myself thinking of a letter I would like to write to her daughter, the one who I will lose Annabelle to. The one who will grow up with all the entitlements and privileges. I often find myself thinking about the things I would tell the children of my friends - when they are grown and like me and capable of seeing their parents as people worthy of grace. I wish I could tell her daughter of how I know Annabelle. Not as a mother but a woman, my love, my beautiful love affair, the object of longing. Her daughter will never see her as I do - and that is fair, because she will have her own sacred perspective.

There are some truths you cannot un-taste. But there will be other truths and they will not be mine. This is the bittersweet intersection. Annabelle with her silver linings and me with my romantic tragedies. What a match we make. Sweet, familiar voyeurs. Fellow travelers.

On different bleachers past the duck pond and the basketball courts, Annabelle and I can see the ugly naked curve of the highway- and a garish child's play structure, situated on disgustingly, expensive prefabricated boulders.

I ask her what she would do if she only had a year to live.

She gives me a bullshit answer. The travel the world answer, which I don't buy.

Annabelle considers the question again and says, " I would do all the drugs." Then Annabelle and I talk about how anticipating motherhood often feels like anticipating death. Mothers often live halve lives or quarter lives, lives in service of others.

I don't want to lose my identity. I don't want Annabelle to lose hers. But she has her white picket life in front of her, and I have my lost girl dive in front of me.

We are not the same. Our definitions of freedom will always tear us a part.

What is the world without lost girls? They are the ones with extraordinary lives, and this I must do more so than motherhood or wifehood or sisterhood. I will someday be extraordinary.

But today. Somewhere inside of me the lost girl in me sits missing the lost girl in Annabelle . And all the intricate magic of history. I wish I could say: "Wake up and dream with me."

Later when it is time to say goodbye, we walk together to our respective cars. We stand across from one another, and here I get to hug her as is socially acceptable.

I feel all of her against me, her breasts and her belly and her arms and the angular sheen of her head against mine. She pulls me deep into her arms, and we embrace in the dark as friends who have tasted the secret of one another and there it is: both bittersweet and silver lining - the flavor of Annabelle and me.