The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction)

Part 11

I’ve been busy, okay? reading and having a minor nervous breakdown. (I used to have a boyfriend who would tell me I read too much. Now he sends me emails about George Orwell.) Oh, Ativan, my Ativan, the absinthe of the modern world.

Hey, it’s better than rocks in the old pockets now isn’t it?

One of the books I read was The Flamenco Academy by Sarah Bird. Lots of foot stomping and over the top chick lit drama, but one part did get me thinking…

The more outgoing character tells the more wallflower type character before a heavily freighted audition, talking about the older star performer, “You do everything she does except compete. Story of your life in a nutshell.”

“Girls always wait for the world to give them things. To see the sweet, smart, obedient girls they are, then paste a star on their foreheads. It doesn’t work that way. The things you really want you have to take…”

There is a nice rhyme in there.

I don’t know, maybe it is the home county, one quarter Chinese, blood in my veins, but ever since I met him Christen has been hammering me with the same message.

The thing is people do give me things. Clothes and first class tickets and… well—men do.

I had a date on Sunday with this world-renowned classical pianist that was in town. We went to the art museum. We saw the lovely Japanese wood block prints of birds and flowers. The ones I like best were hand sewn into these beautiful books. He wouldn’t stop talking. All about how he owns a print by this guy or that and look at this detail or that.

A real collector. The good news is that he bought me a membership in the museum so for the next year I can go whenever I want. He said when he kissed me goodbye on the forehead that he’ll think of me there, a beauty among beauties…

Yeah, yeah.

Man, he had extraordinary expressive hands that played me well.

This competition thing though, it is up for me right now. And of course the food thing and my doctor was telling me yesterday he thought well maybe it is time for more talk therapy and I didn’t really want to tell him that my last experience with talk therapy was a disaster and that it well kind of umm fucked me up…

And that got me thinking about how hopeful I was when I first went to see Peter in his spare Zen office down at John’s Landing with the atrocious Ikebana on the table.

The bad flower arrangement should have been a tip off to the trouble to come but I was so wrapped up in my hurt and wonder at the rejection I was receiving in the “Poetry Community” that my trouble ahead radar wasn’t working and he was highly recommended by someone I trusted.

Goes to show you never can tell…