Paradox of Seven

I stopped believing. Journey would be so dissapointed. I know I'm not supposed to write off love -that's just a thing Taylor Swift does to make music. But I honestly can't...

I swung my feet up onto the window seat, still wearing my calf-height boots wet from the rain. On a normal day I'd kill myself for risking mud on the soft pink cotton of the window seat cushions; but today I didn't care. They say there're seven stages in crushing on a person: 1) twitter-pated, 2) anger toward person crush is "seeing", 3) anger toward crush, 4) crush never leaves your mind, 5) you claim you're moving on from crush, 6) the time spent between any past stages, and 7) actually moving on.

But what if you moved on not from the crush but from love in general?

My conscience forced me to remove my boots.

No doubt this is part of stage seven, feeling you could never love again. But I'm not certain: this feels deeper, more real. More... empty. It's not absence of reciprocated affection that plagues my mind to muddle out reasoning. It's absence of affection in general: I just don't feel it.

I curled my toes under in a pathetic attempt to keep them warm. Cold seeped past any warmth-providing article and embedded itself in my pores.

I wonder if he intended this,that day he made me stop believing. I wonder if he meant to give me that sexual look of love that belittled me as much as it pierced my heart. I wonder if he meant to make a mockery of seven months.

Seven months.

I pulled my knees to my chest, the cold sticking to every gland regardless of my huddling.

Seven months to love and lose. Seven months to live and learn. Seven months to abolish all faith in the male sex for the rest of a lifetime.

The rain outside is lightening, becoming more confident in returning as vapor to the atmosphere of the clouds.

Or maybe I just need seven more months to fall back into love. Or seven days.

Or seven years.

Or maybe I broke a mirror sometime back, and I must repeat the "crush" cycle of seven a total of seven times before my curse is demolished.

As Much As I Love You, I Can't Control You

As much as I love you, I can't control you.
You'd think I'd be able to by now, but I can't;
Being an actress should at least give me a leg-up.
I don't even know you.
I can't define parts of you when they ask;
I'm ignorant. I play the part. I'm a manipulator.
I put you how I see fit, but I don't understand.
And then you deceive me and cut hearts and confidences,
And I stand in the blood you scourged,
The havoc you reaped, and I blame you for all the wrong.

What right have I? You merely do what you were meant for.
You merely follow your predestined path.
I'm to blame for trying to make you what you're not.
I'm to blame for pulling you out of context.
I'm to blame for never learning of you in the first place.

Anne Frank took pride that she could work with the likes of you.
I applied that to myself.
But I have to gift in this regard.
I have no strength in this purpose.
It's but an easy talent of mistake,
That I regard as talent of success, that puts us where we are.

As much as I love you, I cannot control you.
I am a cannon of rhetoric, fuse constantly ablaze.
I can't blame you for hurting him, and him hurting me.
In the hands of one more skilled all would have been well.
But I am despicable and horrendously flawed.
I swear off this vain word work here and now,
Until the time I learn what you really are,
And how to show love through your parts.

All About the Wordplay

I'll never forget my first conscious experience with a pun.

As a little girl I was babysat by my grandmother every day; this meant I played in the front living room with all her strange toys while the television created noise in the background, and was occasionally checked on and fed.

In those days, and as several stations still insist upon doing, television channels showed re-runs. But they'd pick the same eight episodes to show almost constantly, very rarely airing the others. Needless to say, when it came to the shows I was more partial to, I became rather familiar with these consistent re-runs.

There was one episode of The Powerpuff Girls in which the Mayor was somehow booted from office. He sat on a street curb, perhaps outside of the Town Hall, and he said something that I couldn't ever quite grasp. And much as I would with a Jason Mraz song lyric today, I'd spend the course of the day mulling over that statement. (I think I'd heard his "statement" as a playground song at some point prior in my life; you can ask me to sing it now and I happily will. It never left my immediate memory.) I'd sing the song as I thought about him saying it, but my uneducated mind couldn't grasp the double speak.

At some point the episode was re-aired yet again, and it suddenly all made sense.

The Mayor sat in his rag-tag form on the street corner or whatever it may be, and said glumly, "The old white Mayor just ain't what he used to be."

And then a random white horse stamped its foot merrily in place as it stood in the middle of the road, and Blossom flew down in front of it and began some sort of pep-talk.

I'm not a horse person. No one within arms length of me is a horse person. I didn't know a horse was called a mare, or that such a word would almost be pronounced mayor. It never hit me until that moment that the Mayor was referring to himself on the forefront, but the double speak about the horse and the cameo appearance by said horse were the real joke in the situation. The horse had miffed me as much as the Mayor had, but I'd always taken his phrase as a means to figuring the whole thing out.

And I was right.

And I was so ridiculously proud of myself for getting it. And I firmly believed I was the only little girl in the country to have deciphered that rascally Mayor's riddle.

And maybe I was. Or maybe I wasn't.

I mean, I'd seen the episode enough. Perhaps I was the only little girl in the country that took such a large number of re-runs to find the relevance of the horse.

Whatever the case may be, be my little brain a genius or moron, I've never forgotten that image of the bedraggled Mayor, and I've never forgotten his bewildering sentence.

And this pun has always been my guilty pleasure to drop into conversation whenever it seems relevant. How could I let a cognitive victory like that go to waste?