Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Nameless

Nameless brushed her brown hair over her shoulder, while standing idly in the line at the grocery store checkout. She looked down at the shoes she was wearing, the fabricated hopes for acceptance in the workplace was the sole reason for buying them. They were "sturdy, classical, and colorful" according to salesperson who sold them to her months ago, and comparing to those glowing adjectives, the shoes were everything Nameless was not. Nameless was a shallow puddle of water, dripping all over any person she wanted to be and trying to become a part of them. Nameless was nearly a shadow at this point, mirroring everyone's moves and was a reflection of unoriginality.
When she got to the register, the young teenage cashier smiled out of boredom and corporate urge, and asked whether 'paper or plastic'.
See, questions were pipe bombs for her. Little geysers of lies and confusion, they set her off to stretch the truth till it fit around the waists of nearly every one she longed to be.
"Paper, please. The blank under sides of them are great, I paint on them when I run out of sketch paper." Nameless said, smiling. The cashier shrugged and smirked.
"Yeah, guess that's cool." Nameless smiled broadly and nodded, even as the cashier looked away. The whole seed of all of was that Nameless never drew, she couldn't even make stick figures look interesting.
Nor could she cook. Or did she ever go skydiving, like she once told a co-workers after she over-heard them discussing doing some a bit lighter - bungee jumping. Nameless never went to Italy, even though she shot her hand up in her college art history class five years earlier and announced to the whole class that she had - and that Da Vinci's "Last Supper" was just so different in person.
Nameless named met Madonna, or shared a personal trainer with Scarlett Johanson - but she told every one she had. Over and over gain.
While walking to her car from the market - a car she had chosen after seeing a commercial with it, being advertised by a tall but buxom model - and wanted not just the car, but to be that woman. Nameless was faceless. A blank roll of paper rolled to rhythym in her chest, like a heart, but unlike a heart, it didn't pump blood through her. But these blank papers were her fuel, to keep going and to keep searching. Nameless finger painted many different lives on these pages, all of them technicolor internal utopias that she could one day inhabit.
Every day, there was a new Nameless. She was putting her self on an never ending assembly line, being constructed and sharply defined by what other people did or say. There was big empty pit inside of her, being filled with buckets and buckets of bullshit and big black lies. Nameless knew plenty of circles and lept through many hoops. The friends in her book club knew her as nerdy and bookish as the summer days were long. The friends downtown knew her to order shot after shot - although not knowing Nameless chased them each with a beer, and spitting the shot in the bottle, not drinking it.
There was no Nameless. Was there ever?
Once you hammer lie nails into the fleshy veil of people's thought process, they stay there. Even if you take this nails away, the scars remain.
Nameless drove slowly out of the grocery store parking lot, passing the various shops in the plaza. A karate studio, "I could take karate, I want to be an athlete," she thought. There was a gym also there, and despite her utter dislike of exercise and fear of doing it in front of others, Nameless debated going in and filling out a membership application.
If there was a Nameless, she had went missing at puberty.
Where is the milk carton with her faceless face gracing the back?

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