Post by Jessica on Mar 3, 2013 9:07:21 GMT -5
So, where to begin?
I guess you could say that in a sense my life has been made up of three stories.
The first story is about a little baby. A girl. I don't know her name, or much about her. I know that she was born in a small backwater hospital. Nobody was there to hold her mother's hand, or tell her that everything was going to be okay - which was a good thing, because it wasn't. About two seconds after the final push a small, scared, screaming little person was dragged into the real world.
They say that people are born to be something. They're born leaders, or born losers, or natural-born killers, or whatever. I don't know who that baby girl was born to be, because about thirty minutes after that first initial "Waah!" a pen was busily scrawling the necessary signatures on a stack of forms from Social Services, slicing neatly through all those newly-minted family ties. And, just like that, the baby girl's story ends. She becomes someone else, and gets a new story.
That new story takes a few twists and turns. A lot of it is pretty boring, and I'm pretty sure some of it's made up. Somehow, that baby girl grows into a person named Jessica Morales. She doesn't like how that name sounds. It's not really her name, really. That baby girl, if her story hadn't ended, would have grown into an Alexis or a Maria or a Leah. You know, somebody with a good name. But she's not that baby girl, and now she's just dumb old dumb-name Jessica Morales, living with a Mom that's not her Mom and a Dad that's not her Dad. Jessica's story is interesting, insofar as a life can be. She grows up, she takes piano, she gets her heart broken by Tony Thayers in the ninth grade, gets turned down for the cheerleading squad (she tells herself it's because they're jealous, but the obvious fact is that she's as gangly and unco-ordinated as a newborn fawn).
Senior year hits, and Jessica realizes that she likes girls. They stir something up in her that a thousand Tonys never could. She does't know who to talk to about this (her few girlfriends would freak out, none of them wanting to be, like, girlfriends, and her Mom-that's-not-her-Mom is known for her frequent diatribes against "them gays."), so she doesn't talk to anybody about it. It's not really their business. Most people would find this sort of thing intolerable, after all, repressing one's sexuality is tantamount to repressing one's life. But Jessica, on some level, has always been repressing her life, or, at least, the life that she should have been living. And so it slips under the surface, like so many other things.
Jessica grows some more. Not much taller, though she fills out in the desirable areas. She finds a job with a recording company in Los Angeles, doing menial gruntwork for someone who does something for someone else, who in turn does something for someone else, and all of this thing-doing eventually results in a new album. It's an awful job, but at least it's interesting, and occasionally she gets to see famous music artists that her employment contract forbids her from coming within ten feet of.
This sort of monotonous story would generally conclude with Jessica Morales continuing to do things for people who do things for people forever, eventually finding a mate who was marginally less objectionable than the rest of the herd, growing old, suffering a variety of interesting medical ailments, before finally succumbing to old age and dying, hopefully before she gets bored enough to start asking whether the story was ever worth appearing in.
In this case, however, the story of Jessica Morales, the thing-doer, came to an abrupt halt one fine sunny day in the Cascade Mountains. Her bosses had begrudgingly sent her away, because somebody somewhere would take away their money if they didn't send her on a vacation that she didn't want to go on to a place she didn't want to go. She spent the first few days lounging around at home, listening to televised strangers mope about wacky comedic problems and make and break contrived relationships with one another. She had lunch at a small sidewalk cafe. Her table was underneath a large Adidas advertisement, which featured a brunette model with a curious smile. Jessica looked up at that model. She was supposed to be running, having a fabulous time jogging around in her Adidas wear. But she was a fake. It was obvious from her smile. Nobody smiles while jogging. Not like that, anyway. But the model was smiling and jogging in her own completely fake, totally wrong way, and she was probably making a ton of money for it. And that, in a sense, is exactly what Jessica Morales was doing. She was no more a recording assistant than the model was a jogger, but for some reason Jessica just kept on jogging along and smiling and doing the things for those people, even though it wasn't, in the strictest sense, real.
So she decided to get real. This endeavour was hampered slightly, on account of Jessica having no real idea what getting real would like it. But she'd been given a good two and a half weeks to figure it out.
I guess you could say that in a sense my life has been made up of three stories.
The first story is about a little baby. A girl. I don't know her name, or much about her. I know that she was born in a small backwater hospital. Nobody was there to hold her mother's hand, or tell her that everything was going to be okay - which was a good thing, because it wasn't. About two seconds after the final push a small, scared, screaming little person was dragged into the real world.
They say that people are born to be something. They're born leaders, or born losers, or natural-born killers, or whatever. I don't know who that baby girl was born to be, because about thirty minutes after that first initial "Waah!" a pen was busily scrawling the necessary signatures on a stack of forms from Social Services, slicing neatly through all those newly-minted family ties. And, just like that, the baby girl's story ends. She becomes someone else, and gets a new story.
That new story takes a few twists and turns. A lot of it is pretty boring, and I'm pretty sure some of it's made up. Somehow, that baby girl grows into a person named Jessica Morales. She doesn't like how that name sounds. It's not really her name, really. That baby girl, if her story hadn't ended, would have grown into an Alexis or a Maria or a Leah. You know, somebody with a good name. But she's not that baby girl, and now she's just dumb old dumb-name Jessica Morales, living with a Mom that's not her Mom and a Dad that's not her Dad. Jessica's story is interesting, insofar as a life can be. She grows up, she takes piano, she gets her heart broken by Tony Thayers in the ninth grade, gets turned down for the cheerleading squad (she tells herself it's because they're jealous, but the obvious fact is that she's as gangly and unco-ordinated as a newborn fawn).
Senior year hits, and Jessica realizes that she likes girls. They stir something up in her that a thousand Tonys never could. She does't know who to talk to about this (her few girlfriends would freak out, none of them wanting to be, like, girlfriends, and her Mom-that's-not-her-Mom is known for her frequent diatribes against "them gays."), so she doesn't talk to anybody about it. It's not really their business. Most people would find this sort of thing intolerable, after all, repressing one's sexuality is tantamount to repressing one's life. But Jessica, on some level, has always been repressing her life, or, at least, the life that she should have been living. And so it slips under the surface, like so many other things.
Jessica grows some more. Not much taller, though she fills out in the desirable areas. She finds a job with a recording company in Los Angeles, doing menial gruntwork for someone who does something for someone else, who in turn does something for someone else, and all of this thing-doing eventually results in a new album. It's an awful job, but at least it's interesting, and occasionally she gets to see famous music artists that her employment contract forbids her from coming within ten feet of.
This sort of monotonous story would generally conclude with Jessica Morales continuing to do things for people who do things for people forever, eventually finding a mate who was marginally less objectionable than the rest of the herd, growing old, suffering a variety of interesting medical ailments, before finally succumbing to old age and dying, hopefully before she gets bored enough to start asking whether the story was ever worth appearing in.
In this case, however, the story of Jessica Morales, the thing-doer, came to an abrupt halt one fine sunny day in the Cascade Mountains. Her bosses had begrudgingly sent her away, because somebody somewhere would take away their money if they didn't send her on a vacation that she didn't want to go on to a place she didn't want to go. She spent the first few days lounging around at home, listening to televised strangers mope about wacky comedic problems and make and break contrived relationships with one another. She had lunch at a small sidewalk cafe. Her table was underneath a large Adidas advertisement, which featured a brunette model with a curious smile. Jessica looked up at that model. She was supposed to be running, having a fabulous time jogging around in her Adidas wear. But she was a fake. It was obvious from her smile. Nobody smiles while jogging. Not like that, anyway. But the model was smiling and jogging in her own completely fake, totally wrong way, and she was probably making a ton of money for it. And that, in a sense, is exactly what Jessica Morales was doing. She was no more a recording assistant than the model was a jogger, but for some reason Jessica just kept on jogging along and smiling and doing the things for those people, even though it wasn't, in the strictest sense, real.
So she decided to get real. This endeavour was hampered slightly, on account of Jessica having no real idea what getting real would like it. But she'd been given a good two and a half weeks to figure it out.