Pain

Sir, I do not need you to save me and perhaps belittle me a little in the process.

In case you have not noticed, I am not drowning. I am not the drowning visitor. I have not descended upon you like winter or a case of the blues. I think that you are the one in need of saving. I only want someone to love me for me. I know it will be a long shot. I know it will at times be heinous when I am unproductive and pouting like a two-year-old child over their spilt milk who wants cake, ice cream and a milkshake. Is that asking too much? Is that simply put, rather asking too much for the world to love me as I am? I go up and down. I go up and down. Up streets and down streets. Down streets and up streets. I love. I love. I love and still it is not enough. I love men. I love the world of men. I love to be dominated by a man but still this is not enough. Do kiddies have to find themselves in the details of that ‘loving me’ picture? Does a house have to fit with a white picket fence?

I would rather pick blue over crazy any day but the choice is not up to me you see. Why the world cannot just love me and see me for who I really am is what I cannot get my head around and then finally I will put a stop to them all. The monsters under the bed. The skeletons in the closet. The ghosts in my head. I find that your kind of intellectualism exists in a reality that is not of my making or made by the hands and instruments of God but of your own. Jesus, there is a word for it. Oracle. You are an oracle. A man after Nostradamus’s own heart. Machiavellian too. There are too many dimensions though for me to completely understand it. Up and down is what I know best of. High and low is what I know best of. I can be a somewhat highly functioning individual if I want to. I can love you even in the end knowing that you will leave me and in leaving me, I will be transformed authentically.

I will long for your arms, your eyes, anything that reminds me of you. Your papers, correspondence, shirts, blazers, ties and your briefcase. I will marvel at the intelligence in your eyes. How can a man be an oracle? How can a man tell the future or your fortune? How can a man be a medium? How can that kind of man love me and then leave me. How can that man have told me repeatedly that he would never leave me cold and when I saw the winter in Arthur Miller’s eyes, I knew I was finished. I knew we were through. Love me once that is enough is all I ask. Silly me. This story should have been called Marilyn or Monroe. Instead, I called it pain. Perhaps I should have called this story Norma. Norma Jean Baker but I am not that dim-witted redhead anymore. He loved me once. Perhaps he will love me twice, and in the end three, four or five times more.

We will renew our wedding vows but I can see that I am not enough for him. Love is stupid because someone and usually it is the woman that is being hurt or worn out in the end. All her vulnerabilities on show for the world to see. She is the type of woman; I am that type of woman, who will wear her heart on her sleeve. Joe, Joe, Joe DiMaggio. Sometimes I miss him so. Everything has to rhyme sometimes. Perhaps he was the only one who really understood me. It is not as if he called me wise in the end. I was the one that pushed him away. He kept on trying to love me and I was fiercely unlovable. Oh Joe. Those were good days. We had good times but the oracle is something else. A man. A man. A man. I swear, he is the type of man who would call me wise. My oracle. My Arthur. My Arthur Miller belongs to the world. There is no escaping him when I am a child.

When I scream, I frighten him. When I am violent, he turns around and leaves the room. When I want to be alone, even then I cannot escape him. I want freedom. In the desert is when I feel the most, free. To think and to be me and not be everybody’s friend or the socialite about town or off to a premier or play. Las Vegas all the way at Sinatra’s or any of the Rat Pack. They understand me. All of me. I can be a girl or a woman. A bleached blonde femme fatale that is all that men see. Women want to be me. Homemakers in New Jersey. All across the globe. Young girls wear their hair as I do. Think they have to dress a certain way, usually inappropriately to impress a fellow. Laugh inappropriately. Smoke, be a smoking hot sex object in the movie business and not a serious actor. I never really wanted this kind of attention in the beginning. All I wanted was love and kiddies. A house with a backyard and perhaps a swimming pool. All the houses in the Hollywood Hills have swimming pools. A garden.

Be careful what you wish for or it just might come true. I am a wise kind of girl now. I know what men want. I know what women want too. I am a loner. I am a goner. I am an interloper. I wear all these elaborate costumes at work but at the end of the day when I go home, I am lonely. Arthur, well he has his work. Listen to me. Look at me. Marilyn Monroe lonely scoffs the world. Never. Paparazzi and people surround her wherever she goes. You are too needy Marilyn. I can hear Arthur say. I cannot meet his eyes now. Already I can sense the spell of winter. It is hellish. Despair is hellish. Whenever you come across the territory of hardship that is particularly hellish for any girl.

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About the Author

Abigail George is a South African author, poet, essayist, and blogger. A short story, novella, and grant writer, George is also a budding entrepreneur, playwright, novelist, and filmmaker. Her latest book is The Scholarship Girl (distributed via African Books Collective and Amazon). She is the recipient of four writing grants from the National Arts Council, the Centre for the Book, and ECPACC. She has briefly studied film, was a trainee at a production company in Johannesburg, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work is published in various anthologies. She has an online presence, blogs at Goodreads, writes travel pieces, and was interviewed by Don Beukes and The Poet Magazine. Her writing has appeared in zines from Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, the UK, the U.S., Finland, Turkey, Uganda, Cameroon, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Malawi. George has three texts forthcoming in 2020: a book, Parks and Restoration (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, edited by Tendai Mwanaka) and two chapbooks, Of Smoke and Bloom (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, edited by Tony Garcia) and The Anatomy of Melancholy (published by Praxis Magazine and edited by JK Anowe).