Sensitive Girl

Do you know the difference between a sensible girl and a sensitive girl? Although it's not necessary that these two girls be different persons.

Hypothetically speaking.

So, it's not that I have reason to complain. I'm alive. That's a plus, I guess.

So, remember when I got just deluged by rain? I mean, the most recent time. Well only a crazy girl would let that happen to her again, on the same week, forsooth!

So, I packed. Clothes, that is. In my sbux backpack.

I'm quite the sbux girl. Like, can I even stay away from one for just one day? Ever? Even after I quit?

But I digress ... and do you know how much those little Naked Fruit juice thingies cost? Every day? Sure, mango madness helps me breathe, but ... maybe breathing is too expensive, for goodness sake.

Did I mention to myself that I digressed?

So I went to the zoo earlier this week. Saw the blesbok (imagine my lips caressing that word as I say it over and over and over again) and the macaw, that would not say 'Hello' to me, no matter how many times I kept saying 'Hello' encouragingly to it. Do you know how many times I kept saying 'hello' to that bird? I don't know, either. It was a lot.

And the zoo? There's a lot of walking to it. It's very hilly. And I was just walking along, la-di-dah, and what happens? Out of nowhere the storm clouds come rolling in, and FWHOOSH! it was the deluge. Everybody ran for cover, mommies pushing their babies, chaperones herding the school children, so you know, a smart girl would head under a canopy, right?

Well, the thing is, for me, is that I'm wind and water. And, God! I just threw my head back and spread out my arms and just ... just took it all into my being.

I was eyed by more than one person. I remember one India woman, her almond skin and eyes, now wide with disbelief, just staring at me, so I smiled, God! I smiled at the pure joy of it, being caught in a rain storm and just living!

Of course, my sbux backpack was safely ensconced under the canopy, so I could just, you know, change out of my wet things (drenched, actually), and everything would be fine.

Never mind that I've been coughing for about a month now.

And I didn't take into my calculations that walking back up all those hilly hills to the sbux just outside the zoo (how convenient!) would take a while, like 'more than a half-hour' a while.

And I didn't forecast that the temperature would drop 25°F right after the storm, instantly.

And so the bedraggled field mouse of a girl reached the sbux, and hit the air conditioning in there ... I might've sneezed once or twice.

But I changed in the little girl's room, and so everything would be fine. I'd just metro home. That is: ride the metro rail to D.L. and then take the quatro-cero-dos to my stop and walk the rest of the way home.

Of course, the temperature refused to rise. At all. And then it got late. And the walk home ...

Of course, the rain storm was gone, but then there was this light, then heavy mist that stuck to me, my hair, my clothes, ... my throat.

And I got home, and I plopped down onto bed, and I started coughing.

So here I am. My head is something the size of Luxembourg and I keep coughing and nothing comes up or out, except when it does and it's phlegmatic and a bit greenish. That's not good, is it?

But that's not such a big deal. Not really. What's the big deal is that when I cough, I want my head to come off, because that's what it feels like it's doing. Or what I wish it would do. I have a headache that ... just my head hurts, and is hot.

I guess I'll go to the doctor's Monday. I hate going to the Doctors. I hate the whole medical ... industry. I never felt good going to them as a girl, and then when ... well, steamroller? I've been flattened by them.

Anyway. Went to confession today. Walked. How? you ask. I am so doped up on ibuprofen that I am floating in a sea of pain, that I don't feel at all, because I don't feel a single part of my body.

And I'm a very kinesthetic person. I'm very connected to the feeling of being inside my body, so when I get disconnected from my body, when I go outside myself, which I have done, it's the most bone-chillingly terrifying thing for me. I'm disconnected from my body now, and I feel ... I feel I might not make my way back to myself. But I am detached ... from my body, so I'm feeling emotionally numb, too.

"People do not die of trifling colds!" snaps an irritated Mrs. Bennett to her teasing husband, seriously concerned that Jane might not make it.

Jane made it. But that's because little Lizzy, her sweet, smart, sharp sister was there with her.

I've been hovering in and out of consciousness at home. I ate some ramen noodles ... yesterday? ... morning? and then went back to bed and then I went to confession.

Which was ...

Okay, I didn't go to Fr. P, 'cause the line was long there.

Yeah, right. It was longer there. But if I go to Fr. T, a little Vietnamese man who survived communist interrogation...

They told him to renounce his belief in Jesus, and when he wouldn't, they bashed out his teeth with the butt of a rifle.

... Well, he's old, and hard of hearing, and he hasn't heard my confession in about a year.

Didn't stop him from laying into me. Hard. For the admonishment and absolution. God! I go to confession knowing what a bad, terrible person I am, I confess it, and then I get what-for.

"Masturbating twenty times since the last confession?" he reproached. "That's too much. That's a sickness. You have to get to the root of this evil, or you will be addicted and consumed by it until you die."

Thanks, Father. He absolved me, and then I had to walk home with that. With this. With me. I made it home. I always have lived within a block or two of a church, so I could walk to daily Mass before going to school. And have a vision of Mary. Bonus.

No visions today, 'cause maybe I'm too tired now. I'm going back to bed. So tell me what I'm a shit I am for not telling you how I'm doing, ... after all, I'm barely typing and typing and typing these words in the hands I don't feel connected to these arms I don't know what they are attached to. I can take it. I'm thick-skinned, colored yellow with a dusting of pollen.

And you know what? With all this, I have absolutely no reason to bitch. My sister doesn't have cancer. I didn't get a kidney infection. I didn't lose my husband in Afghanistan. My boss isn't bending me over his desk and fucking me up the ass so he doesn't have to divorce his wife and pay paternity on a child he fathered in me. I'm not in a dead-end job, like the millions of people I see rushing onto and off of the metro every day, pushing me around as if they don't see me, as if I'm not there, so focused they are to get to their jobs ('Susan, correct these reports for me, will you?') and then so focused to get the hell home, so they can fight with their husband and scream at their kids and have a headache and wake up early and do it over again.

I'm none of those things.

So I should be happy. Yay! Yippee!

Good night.