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Tilted
Location: Orange County (the annoying one)
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Okay this isn't exactly ABOUT the picture in question, but it is INSPIRED by the picture, and since the assignment is to write about what the picture brings to mind...
This is an excerpt from my life story, which isn't interesting enough to sell, but is interesting enough (to me) to write. Enjoy...
Quote:
A green tweed with gold flecks in the fabric, it was scratchy and uncomfortable on my ten-year-old skin. The cushions were so thin, you could feel the metal bars from the hide-a-bed poking through them when you sat. In its early days, it had seen beer spilled in its cracks, and as the years went on, then wine, and then baby formula, Kool-Aid and eventually Coca-Cola.
I couldn’t wait for my parents to replace my mother’s old couch from college with a brand new pink sofa with reclining seats and a nifty fold-down drink holder in the center seat.
But my sister was devastated. Five years old, unusually sentimental, shy, with short unruly hair and about thirty five imaginary friends, I thought she was dumb. Staring out the window, I rolled my eyes and pointed at her from the sparkling new sofa whose pink velour fabric matched my dress and made me look so pretty while I sat there. Why does she just sit there on the couch as it waits on the curb in the rain? Why doesn’t my mother make her come inside, spout off one of her usual platitudes about catching one’s death, force her to play dolls with me?
But my mother just smiled her mysterious smile and reminded me that not everyone loves dolls, and that some people love couches, even old, dingy, rapidly wettening couches that sit on curbs awaiting the dump truck to take them away where they’ll molder in a landfill until they’re covered by more trash and then more and even more until eventually they’re gone like everything else we throw away. If that’s the case, then why can’t we just let the dump truck take her, too? If she loves that stupid couch so much, she should marry it and live with it forever and have its stupid couch babies, right?
Eventually even the pink couch became dingy and broken as well, to be replaced with another, then another, and another couch. And when I moved out on my own, for a time I, too, had a scratchy, ugly, hand-me-down couch in my apartment. And I understood then that not everyone can afford the nicest things, that my parents had done the best they could for us, and for that I was glad.
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Her boyfriend had broken up with her just before my wedding, and she shaved her head into a 6” Mohawk the day after. She had been my maid of honor, and God bless her, she did wear the floor-length evening gown and the jewelry and carried the flowers I chose and even wore the makeup. When she cut her hair, my first reaction was to shriek at her idiocy, but then I pictured that little 5 year old sitting on the curb. The same 5 year old who eventually turned into the 25 year old who swallowed her broken heart and put her hair in a French twist and walked down the aisle ahead of me because it’s what I wanted her to do. The same 5 year old who never had it easy because she always wanted to do the opposite of me, the opposite of “normal”, the opposite of “socially acceptable”. She may have been weird, but she wasn’t malicious. She went her own way, but she waited until the day after my wedding to cut off all her hair, because she understood me.
I am the dumb one.
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Last edited by Adri; 07-26-2007 at 02:15 PM..
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