Perhaps Ambiguity is Positive

I was reading a book by a man I was assigned to interview, I’m told he is shy. In his story, a character finds a lone newspaper flipped open to the crossword section. He creeps to it and writes, “Could everybody please be a little less specific? Starting right now?”

There I stood; drink in hand, stirring the contents of the Styrofoam cup with a bendy straw. What did they think of me, perched in the corner of the beat up house on the South Side Slopes? A short girl with messy brown hair tripped into me, her shirt so faded with use that one final tug could leave her before me, bare breasted and drunk. I let her pass, realizing that my hostility was wearing thin. Hostility is funny like that; it consumes until it becomes a baby, nursing out the life of me.

It was St. Patrick’s Day and the city was green and flooded. I felt like a burden to the world until I realized that the festivities kept everyone too occupied to notice. Earlier in the day some friends and I walked the streets of the Strip District and touched the small goods in each shop, touched everything. Our footsteps keeping meter, we constructed an orchestra among the immigrants making their sales of cheap alpaca scarves and sizzling beef fajitas. We walked and looked and smelled and felt. And I hardly noticed the clear puddle I walked through.

I napped after. Noises still buzzed from the Strip while I built my cocoon, but shut out when sleep set in. The fog of an afternoon nap sends my heart out of my chest, beating violently. I don’t know why. When the sun filtered into my friend’s nineteenth floor loft I hatched from my shell. The noises returned and they sounded sweeter; sleep brought me a strange feeling which I now attribute to a transition.

Sometimes I dress myself with the intention of making other females envious. It never works, but the intent is what I notice in retrospect. I dress in tight jeans and a casual gray t – shirt, so I don’t appear to be fulfilling my own purpose. The white Styrofoam cup is put into my hand, and the scene is set. But my day on the carnival – like street where everyone was too busy to notice my shortcomings rings in my mind. I leave my hostility for adoption, I don’t know why.
I thought of those words of ambiguity opening a new faucet. My presence and perception skewed, I wonder if I am bitter at constant or if the months stained with snow made me lose; no.