Tuesday, November 30, 2004

There are days when I am a party hat, a bright pink spotted one with shiny streamers that spout out from the top and fall lightly to brush against your cheek. The sort of streamers that you only seem to be able to see from the corner of your eye unless you take them in hand and show them manually to yourself.
Those days, I'm filled with boxes and boxes worth of streamers and pinatas and watercolor paints and candy. I'm only five years old then, but I want to staple your polaroid inside my skull, and I want to bite your veins and slip myself inside them.
Because then sometimes, in a pausing like the blank space in between cd changes, I'm not a party hat anymore. And I'm not five. Instead, I might be something growly that lives in the back of your closet, and no matter how fast I walk away I keep following myself and stepping on the backs of my own heels.
And it's those days that I'm filled with filing cabinets stuffed with spelling tests and electric bills.
A few days later, when I'm five again, I regret the red pen marks I made all over your paper on bees. And I'm sorry about all the shoes I threw at you when you tried to open the wardrobe door.
But the thing about party hats and growly monsters is that they are a team, and they work together. Without a growly monster behind it, a party hat's really just a paper cone. And that same growly monster, without a party hat, isn't able to exercise the sort of restraint that keeps it crouching in doorways. So if you're looking for one of them, you'll just have to accept the fact that the other one is always there, waiting for its page to turn.

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