Not the kind of ugly that guys write or make movies about, where suddenly I have a blast of blinding instructional beauty. Now that I have a better idea, I will tell you this: I am an ugly woman. For many reasons, I didn’t know who I was yet. It was 2005, but 1999 was how I partied, drinking and drugging like I was seventeen, although my liver kept trying to tell me it was over an outraged decade older. Although in my thirties, I still clung to a teenager’s physical pursuits and mental habits. I was at a perilous age when I committed my crime. Without a doubt, had the dictionary not arrived, this light word that lay so heavily upon me would have crushed me, or what was left of me after the strangeness of what I’d done. So the word with its yawning c, belligerent little e’s, with its hissing sibilants and double n’s, this repetitive bummer of a word made of slyly stabbing letters that surrounded an isolate human t, this word was in my thoughts every moment of every day. The first word I looked up was the word ‘sentence.’ I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an after- life. But as she had known, this one proved of endless use. Other books were to arrive from my teacher. This is the book I would take to a deserted island. While in prison, I received a dictionary.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |