(Photo: by MysteriousFairy ~ 2005)

White Silence

(fiction, by me, finished 06/30/13)

 

(((Story Idea – 2005’ish, based on a photo by Mysterious Fairy:  Write story about a woman whose personality or expressive nature is determined by the mask she wears upon her lips.  – note, initial few paragraphs lifted from Chapter Beth in “Book of Me”)))

 

 

 

 

It is in the mirror of my dreams that I live this life of days.  I blur my morning moments wandering radio waves; my afternoons downing coffee having long ago lost interest in the aroma; my evenings in drunken drowned haze that dissipates with annoying efficiency; my dive towards sleep escorted along bound short stories imagined by Guy de Maupassant absorbing that realization of the world never really changing along the path of humans, having this unenlighten me amid depression of how insignificantly small my place in line must surely be.

 

I found my filling of unwork moments at work in smoke breaks and conversations amid cancer.  I did then have some of my closest friends in those fireholes of specified spots outside the building, beneath the hearse canopy, seated on benches or standing for ladies who might puff into the breeze.  Over those two decades reaching back to my high school youth and ending eventually two years subsequent to the above spanned time, I told more secrets to listening eyes, learned more depth of detailed life from comrades in ash, than I have managed to scrap anywhere in my real world subsequent to the pursuit of health.  I think, in many ways, this became for me the evolution of online life while seeking to unthinkabout work amid the chaos of employment days, my smoke breaks built of both absorption and sharing, dissemination of self.

 

If history allows apologies from my faded memory, I believe the first time I saw her lips migrate around a tobacco filter was a Kool, mentholated mayhem most commonly consumed by the intermingling black colleagues, other high school attendees.  I’ve little doubt Beth’s applied glisten upon lips was immersed in some flavor of berries or bananas, though circumstances of those odd days never gave birth to any scenarios for me to investigate the nature of that moisture absorbed by the spongy foam only pretending to keep cancer at bay from the fire dangling between her nonchalant fingertips in the cafeteria alley wind.

 

Years later, when our paths re-crossed, moments and moments of life and spouses and young children later, she wore a smart knee-length woolen skirt and short-waisted jacket of checkered blue, arms crossed in defiance of the winter wind of our hospital’s break area (smoking and the perception of such allowed outdoors only) for our 5-minute huff between mutually-conducted meetings with long-term, expensive, patient’s families - she as the degree’d social worker growing weary and emotionally worn from now years of finding futility in both the systems and the prism of concepts of one’s loved ones when the chips splinter and rust, myself the accountant offering financial outcomes of various levels of familial adoration or disinterest.

 

Then, in that cold, was a harsh, deep mauve-towards-purple lipstick, thick and purposeful and immediately tattooing for life the now-non-menthal Marlboro Lights 100’s we both happened upon.  I’ve forgotten now what job her husband consumed in those days, but for the purpose of dogpaddling financially I know Beth was working part-time weekends at some Mall department store for two reasons - one because she insisted on professional attire, perhaps jaded by the perception of peers at some earlier public service position with Metro, so she worked where she shopped for discounts on her wardrobe, and additional food for the family table of three. 

 

And for cigarette money because her life was apparently overwhelming enough without having a not-guilty out in arguments over the financial burden of a method of sanity found in the outdoor stolen seconds at work, worth skipping lunch just as we’d done in high school save perhaps a diet coke can with an angled bendie straw that likewise shared an instant ring twinned to her cigarette’s seesaw to her rounded wrapping tongue, this fierce hinted-purple mask upon her lips making its eternal mark upon the remnants of her world.

 

I left no such similar memory of myself, well other than literal DNA, upon my own stubs crumpled in a rush to escape the chill and enter another sad measure of another family’s moments I could not control.

 

I think perhaps it would have been Beth about whom I first correlated the mask upon her lips with the mood and path of her days, Beth who’d unknowingly sparked my need to fill bored sections of my brain with an internal tracking and pattern perception of the lips amid moments of women in my day and their correlation.  I went into this mode without preconceptions.  I’d known my light bulb of Beth far too long, though with a measurable and admitted gap midstream, to harbor a narrow view of her as some stereotype, or rather really slightly filled file folder that we (by necessity) turn so many of our human interactions into daily to simply survive, to respect them by glimpsing and storing some minutia should we happen upon them again during our somedays, but nothing more.

 

No, because it began with my sudden acquisition, the melt into my empathy some second of scanning between her eyes and her lips as she regaled some life’s story, I understood the influence of the lipstick’s tint.  I say I went into this without a theory, only really this absolute certainty that there was certainty in this relationship of who she became (or was) on a given day. 

 

I was unsure of the causality, of the direction even of such a thing.

 

Was she subconsciously picking a color relative to her waking mood? Was it more indirect, her attitude towards the day reflected by her wardrobe selection and the color of the lipstick a false-carrot byproduct of simply matching her attire?  Were there conspiracies within the cosmetic industry where even more odd byproducts of other manufacturing hand-me-down’s being purposefully chemical added by some evil overlord of Revlon for the soul intent of controlling women and transvestites and goth punk rockers into planned drones?  Were not the black lipstick of those renegades of depression literal proof of the very correlation of applied color and emotional state of mind?

 

Although, yes, it started with Beth and, although, yes, I do ponder her often, wonder what has evolved for her world I lost a grasp upon decades ago, it wasn’t hers that cemented this hypothesis’ reality.  That belonged to Amanda.  That glue of connectivity lived and stained in the white lipstick she adorned for the world.  It was she that silenced them all.

 

Much as I suppose most people would like to embellish the stories to our children of how we met their other parent, to help build fairy tales of mystery that hold true to the format of meaning and romance we’d been taught since our own childhoods, I would like to suggest that I first met Amanda through some mutual reach for a hardback book in a tiny claustrophobic store, or rescuing a damsel short of a few pennies at the beach-side bar for her 4th longneck bud as really any excuse born to say some fumbled words at a beauty.

 

But instead I simply met Amanda through a website of shared blogs.  In my spare moments from life I would sketch from the photographs of models because I had no models of my own, and it was in the infancy of her career that I adored her poses (understandably as much the credit to the photographers as to her ownership of being a subject to any variety of inspired artists.  And she wrote words, sometimes about her life, but like my own blog also with spurts of ancient memories turned into poems or fictional short stories and hints at prophecies.  And she liked what she became from my #2 pencil and sketchpad. And as I did with her mind and her beauty, she attempted reconcile my own blog rambles with whatever opinion she’d developed of the type of person that would produce my particular outcomes of art.

 

So when she skyrocketed only moments in time, mere years later, upon fashion magazines, in advertisements of weekly chronicles amid stories of celebrities and sports icons, I was even more mesmerized to be even vaguely, tangentially touching, owning in my own way upon my walls the pieces of her soul I’d documented in lead and a sketchpad, someone now influencing a generation.  Or a subset of a generation.

 

I’m unsure the money involved, something that was never mentioned in her blog, when she became the chosen one, the contracted model exclusively for the solid white chalk dense and meringue-thick application when the next fashion craze was created in corporate boardrooms, but it layered upon her lips to blend in with her pale skin to create an eruption of wanton compliance among the masses.  Her image, from every angle, in every setting of the world, became pages and pages of glossy print.

 

I do not claim to have viewed every one, though since the same short is replicated in a given month within most periodicals, I suspect I experience them en masse.  Though I have no stories from my childhood of cute shoplifting of penny candy or subsequent beatings by parents and confessions to uncaring store clerks, I did - every time - rip the page of her photographs from any magazine I happened up, in doctor’s offices, in car repair waiting rooms, in the lobbies of hotels at which I was no guest but merely passing purposefully by.

 

And I drew them all, filled thumbtacked edge to edge the walls of may garage with her image, over and over, and those white undefined massive lips.  I added only one additional media to my pencil and paper interpretations - something to whiten Amanda’s lips in my sketch.  I sometimes used old thickening bottles of liquid paper that had amassed in work storage cabinets in prior years that simply no one used anymore.  I used white acrylic paint.  I eventually simply bought a tube of her brand and applied it directly, hoping to not need explain the lipstick if discovered by my wife or children.

 

It took fewer years for this white shade, with competing brands likewise jumping bandwagon, to be the exclusive fixture passing me upon busy sidewalks, down long hallways at work, than it had taken Amanda to rise from a viable written blog that filled my head as well as my eye’s appetite to being the most recognized face upon the communicative portion of the planet.

 

But she never wrote anymore, stopped updating her blog because it was discovered by the masses and overwhelmed, too public to be the sorta-public pleas she’d previously played for the limited audience world of which I’d been a member of that minimal sets of orbits she’d insisted she adored.

 

At least, that was my first thought.  But, again, I’d forgotten by then that the purpose of research and theorems is to not preconceive, to not close ones mind to other possibilities.

 

See, those people, those other women I pass upon my day’s wander, those women all wearing white plastered across their lips - they all only remind me of her, of Amanda.  I lost my daughters in a crowd on minimal density because though they were waving frantically at me to follow along, I saw only a sea of Amanda.  I could no longer remember my wife’s name because even in her sleep her lips retain their bleach of white and I am too awestruck to sleep knowing that suddenly I am that close to Amanda, a fixture in my world that I’d never before personally met.

 

I cannot recall, so thrilled am I nightly, so lost am I daily, and so unsure how to reconcile this unending, unrested flow, when I last slept.  It is too unnerving, to realize she is everywhere, is everyone.  Perhaps I last slept when I was shocked to discover that I was almost completed with my last attempted sketch, was literally at the point of filling in the paper plump protruding mouth’s outline with my tube of white lipstick and, maybe because I’d not touched its tip to the paper, realized the ripped magazine photo I’d spent hours replicating in my own finger’s voice was not a photo of Amanda at all, but some impostor for some competing brand’s attempt to become her. And I’d helped confirm their marketing’s belief if I, who now surely knew the nuances of her profile prolifically could be so foolish.

 

Thing is, what I discovered late in my research managed within my brain’s constant computing is that it is this lipstick, this white mask is silencing her mood her words her interactions even with me, my original contemplation birthed as truth.

 

I confirmed this when swimming through the downtown tides of replicas of her, of other women wearing the appearance of Amanda, realized that none of them speak to me, none says a word.  The chain of that lipstick upon the ownership of freewill whitewashes even the ability to interact with me.  It is not that there are thoughts unspoken - instead there are no longer thoughts, only replications, redundancies likewise mimicking Amanda’s slavery of silence. 

 

This is why I must begin removing lips, of eviscerating the white silence, to free her soul to speak to me again.  But this requires practice, much like the years of dedication to my pencil upon my sketchpad, before I can attempt to free and perfect Amanda.  For my medical school I have managed with exacto knife to remove the white lipstick from all of my sketches of her, have experienced angles and leans upon ladder and sweat seeping into my blinking eyes as I concentrated and completed this project over the last few months. 

 

And they are all free, all able to be seen fresh and unencumbered by silence.  Because they do each contain and preserve moments of her soul, I pray that this has provided Amanda some peripheral relief.  If she can just hang on, just allow me to hone my skills, just perhaps a few weeks more.  There are redundancies of her everywhere, opportunities to advance my technique, to fulfill my residency.

 

If Amanda can just not scream until I arrive.