The Beginning

I am a masochist. I had a moment of self-discovery today, a few hours earlier when I was standing in my kitchen, eating yogurt with one sock on, (because the urge for yogurt hit while I was still peeling them off and really, who am I to deny these cravings?). Somewhere in between pureed strawberry bits and low-fat dairy, I was musing about my crackup relationship with e-harmony, and I had one of those epic moments of clarity. My screwed up revelation: Misery really turns me on. Epic movies, impossible relationships with impossible people, tortured moments, esoteric disjointed poetry, cheap teenage paperbacks filled with gothic violence, old words and ripped pieces of lace. All of this stuff really gets me going.

Really, this shouldn’t be such a big surprise to me, as I’ve always recognized my self-destructive streak. The first time I heard the word “nihilism” it rolled around on my tongue tasting like candy, and I scribbled it down on the corner of a piece of paper in an instinctive heat, knowing it would one day be on my tombstone, my divorce certificate, scrawled in permanent tattoo on my bum.

I’m not exactly sure where this feeling first began. I probably got screwed up real early, back when my babysitter would play “Labyrinth” on replay for us kiddies to keep the lot of us all slack-jawed and silent for hours on end. All those years of watching David Bowie strut around in a shattered wig and tights clearly did something to my state of mind. I started off life believing that goblins were real, David Bowie was God or something real close to it that deserved a capital letter, and every man should have a nether region of impossible size that defied the laws of gravity and common sense.

None of this did any good to my still-forming mind, I’m sure. But whatever the affects of early exposure to rock-icon-in-hosiery, more recently I’ve become consumed with a sense of urgency about life that flying to Spain, piercing various parts of my body and riding on the back of motorcycles barefoot just can’t cure. Whatever it is, a desire to live or an ill-concealed death wish brought about my own mortality served to order on the solemn face of a prescription pad, a simple blip in the cosmic crisis of a girl in her 20’s, or something else, the thought occurs that it might be time for a change.

Can one girl of relative height and subsequent station give up her taste for desolate storylines and the languorous taste of danger, neck sweat, and dirty olives? Would I be happier in committed relationships, pearls, and longer hemlines? Are the bad girls or the good girls really having more fun?