It was not entirely out of the ordinary for me to be found stranded at the supper table for hours after others had finished dinner. I don't care for peas.
Eight years old, given to telling tall tales.
My mother, with her balanced meals and long developed immunity to my bullshit is having a hard time believing me when I say that I literally cannot eat. I have a terrible pain at my shoulder, can't turn my neck, lift my arm, never mind a fork full of the loathsome peas.
It's nothing short of a miracle that I survived my youth, having so deftly avoided nutrition as I managed to for the most part.
Hours earlier, I'd been working on my pirouettes. I wasn't allowed to wear my ballet attire unless I was in my weekly class or practicing and since I felt awfully special in that get-up, I was often found practicing, but it hardly benefitted me.
Everyone knows that spinning round and round is oh so much greater when done in rapid succession. It's the dizziness that makes it wonderful and it was the dizziness that led me to tumble softly and not so gracefully to the carpeted floor in our living room, near the hifi, where I'd spun and spun and spun.
Wolf cryer, exaggeration prone, attention seeking, little white liar, now with a broken collar bone and absolutely no way to make myself believable.
Such a big and permantent lesson to be learned by such a small person.
My mother's guilt driven attention, which flowed thick and heavy all over me upon realizing that I was actually injured and not simply escaping vitamin consumption was sadly no real consolation. I took no great pleasure in any special treatment that seemed to come so automatically for the invalid sporting a cast. I was in some self imposed bubble, able to see it all, but not feel anything as I realized all the way down to the calcium hardness of my very, apparently breakable bones, at the tender age of eight, I had no credibility. None. Understanding fully what it meant to be untrusted and then the bigger burden; finding a way to become truthful knowing then that my life might get awfully uncomfortable if I could not figure out how to speak without embellishment.
So today, these days, now, when I speak of something somewhat monumental and close to my soul, I can be stifled by my own base need for delivering my words with bluntness. It seems it's either fantasy or frankness when I talk about my inner most feelings and never in between. I'm pretty sure this is why...
my collar bone was connected to my heart bone.
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