Post by lou on Nov 11, 2011 17:22:07 GMT -5
| [atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,10,true][atrb=style, background-color: #131313;,true][cs=2] LOLITA VIRGINIA MEADHAM  | |
| [atrb=width,200] nickname lo, lola birthday january third, 1991. place of birth manhattan, new york city, new york. gender female. | [atrb=width,200] sexuality bisexual. nationality american membergroup townie. play by veranika antsipava. |
| [cs=2] likes: classic rock and roll music, black and white movies, earning something through hard work, the old people smell, crappy horror flicks, sarcasm, people who can teach her something. dislikes: tests, high maintenance girls (or boys, really), feminists, people who try to shove their beliefs down her throat, being ordered around. personality: analytical, bossy, intelligent, sarcastic, independent and overachieving. family: aunt greta duchamp, 54, housewife. uncle louis duchamp, 56, retired magazine editor. cousin richard duchamp, twenty nine, contracter. cousin david duchamp, twenty five. cousin zachary duchamp, twenty one, artist, rooms with lo. history: Most people try to pay as little attention to the homeless as possible. They step over their extended feet, refuse to look at the crippled, gnarled fingers curled around styrofoam cups, gag against the harsh scent of piss and body odor. Sometimes they go as far as to ignore quiet cries for help. The homeless themselves lose their identity and become one of a swarming mass of parasitic entities without families, or previous lives, or hopes or dreams. They no longer have names, just an identifying stench and occasionally a dog or a cat to crawl alongside them on the streets. That's the way it is in the city; when there's nowhere else to turn, churches let them sleep on the cement in front of the doors. Me? I know better. They have names and histories and voices. They are people, just like you and me, shoved into unlikely circumstances because they were dealt a shitty hand of cards by a reprehensible fate. They are fathers and mothers, or brothers and sisters. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces. Parts of families removed as a demonstration of the negative affects of drugs or a clear example of the stock market crash. They are my father. When I was six years old, my family was reaping the benefits of the early 90s with greedy hands, piling dollar after dollar into their stock accounts and watching with fascinated eyes as the numbers continued to climb. Though the financial prospects were excellent, my mother's health wasn't in accordance with her spending abilities. I don't remember much of her, save the silky texture of her hair and the whisper of her fingertips across my cheeks, but my father says she was very beautiful and wore pearls and Chanel number five wherever she went, regardless of the dress code. I imagine her to be like Audrey Hepburn except with blonde hair and Elizabeth Taylor's violet eyes, but there were no pictures taken of her and I have nothing to cement my belief that she even existed. Perhaps the early years of my life that I can only vaguely recollect are a reconstruction of movies I've seen here and there, and I never had a mother at all. My mother, fantastical or not, died the same year of complications due to AIDS. Unlike the New York City junkies my father would later share the gutter with, she contracted HIV from an infected blood transfusion and was lucky to live with it as long as she did before she was taken from us. After she was gone, I gather that my father's personality shifted rapidly. He drew up within himself and shifted from warm and inviting to cold and remote, lost somewhere I couldn't join him. I dutifully attended school but never expected much from him; he wasn't very lenient in the emotions department or the sentimentality portion of his brain and I sensed almost inherently that I made him uncomfortable because I reminded him of my mother, if not in looks than in behavior. It was around this time that my aunt Greta began to toy with the idea of taking me, to raise me with her sons and ensure I was receiving the proper childhood that she felt I deserved, but it wasn't until three years later when I was ten years old and my father lost everything in a faulty investment, relegating himself to a life of poverty and homelessness, that she took the initiative and relocated me to Sapphire Bay, California from Manhattan. To say I missed my father would be an exaggeration, as I had and still have little to no idea who he is or what he was like before the devastating impact of losing my mother. I know his sense of humor was noteworthy, I know he had a handsome smile, and I know Greta mourns the loss of such an incredible vitality, but the last time I saw him he was nothing but the empty shell of someone who presumably had been a great man. Though she offered repeatedly to allow him to move into the mother-in-law suite above the garage in their house in Sapphire Bay, he insisted that he wanted to stay and work out the problem in Manhattan. The last time I heard from him, I was twelve and he called three weeks late to wish me a happy birthday; I don't know what happened to him, but I can only assume that whatever it was, it wasn't good and he probably never solved the financial crisis he put himself and, briefly, me in. Life with my aunt and cousins was ordinary but comfortable. Her husband worked as an overseer in the nearby factory, she was an elementary school teacher, and they had three boys: Richard, David, and Zachary. She promised me I wouldn't be a burden, and that they could well over afford me, but there was always a gratitude in me that I felt I could never repay with monetary or emotional currency, and I still remain indebted to them for all the things they did for me. I did well with school, but never felt inclined to attend college and instead got a job during high school and saved up enough to move out after I graduated, and start working full time as a waitress at Five Guys. My life is ordinary, but comfortable. I have an identity. I have feelings, thoughts, hopes, and dreams. I have not become part of a parasitic entity, but instead a working-class hero with a tray of drinks and the promise of a brighter future, because I believe in second chances and beating fate. I will prove myself to my peers. lou - sixteen - a couple months the first time i saw her, she was pale and small and the palms of her hands had raised lacerations when she touched her fingers, just barely, into mine in a greeting by far too old for our nine year old selves. i hated her almost immediately for being so irreparably damaged, so fragile. from the beginning, she was a piece of china that i could never touch and it bothered me to know that she existed in this peculiar semi-world between reality and fiction where children could live their entire lives without ever really feeling anything, without falling and scraping their knees or bothering with the childish tendencies that, prior to that occasion, i had reveled so freely in. it bothered me that for the first time, i felt inadequate. like, despite the fact that she was only barely younger than me, i felt like i had to assume the role of caretaker and protect her. with her lack of a childhood, mine vanished into thin air where it resided, laying dormant, until she finally dissipated into something else, something even less than she was that first time i saw her, swathed in lace and exhausted from the effort of standing. her father's handshake, contrasted with hers, was almost laughably strong. he jerked my arm up and down four times, stressing the socket, before he bent to my level, looked me in the eye, and made me swear to take care of her. i did, and that was that. it was a bond we would never break. i realized i loved her when i was seventeen years old. she was in the hospital and she was convinced it was her final hurrah and i broke her out, and we drove from the upper east side all the way to niagara falls before i realized that this was probably the last time i would ever see her outside of the fluorescent green lighting of the hospital and when i found her sitting by the water of my father's rental property i thought i was going to split in half because part of me wanted to scoop her up and hold her for the rest of her limited days and the other part of me wanted to run, as fast and as far as i could, away from this woman, this girl, this delicate, breakable girl who could take my heart and destroy it with one fluttering of those thick black eyelashes. i didn't run. i promised her i would stay with her in the glass house by the falls and hold her until the end and we slept together on a blow up mattress in the middle of the floor where everyone who wanted to see us could see the perfect curve of her hip and the fact that my hand, svensson ring on the thumb, was protectively curved around her bare middle. i told her i loved her in the morning. i told i would do anything for her in the morning. i told her we didn't have to go back if she didn't want to in the morning. she blushed and watched me and pulled the sheets up to her chin and made me promise i would think before i did anything impulsive. it was months before she would let me tell her again i loved her; it wasn't until she was positive she was going to live that, with my head resting in her tiny lap, she kissed my forehead and, in perfect french, promised, “je t'aime plus, mon cher.” my father overdosed on cocaine when i was in my second year of college and left the family business to me. though initially i had trouble handling everything, noemi was an incredible financier and managed to organize everything to a manageable amount, the perimeter of which we now solely operate within; it wasn't long before the nouveau riche status of svensson realty was forgotten in favor of the sophisticated image we began to portray, after, of course, she convinced me that it was okay to change my father's creation to fit the description we sought. i dropped out of college, assured i would be able to provide for noemi, and proposed to her with the engagement ring my grandmother gave to my father, and he to my mother, and she to me. another of the infamous svensson family heirlooms. shortly thereafter, we moved to paris to extend our capital to a more european base. i worry about her. sometimes my yearning for her health is so overwhelming that it verges on an obsession, but she refuses to live her life in the same box she was raised in and it scares me to think that in order to prove she is just as good as anyone else (though of course, this is ridiculous as she's infinitely better than anyone else), she feels the urge to do things that will stress her body. i know, and she knows, that i wouldn't be able to handle her getting sick again. i will protect her to the ends of the earth from anything that might harm her, but the problem doesn't come from me – it comes from her body, which is a vengeful creature. all the money in the world couldn't buy her the health she needs when the cancer reoccurs and it sickens me to know that my noemi, my beautiful, fragile, breakable noemi, could be relegated to a pile of bones. so i shower her with gifts and affection. i memorize her body with my fingertips, her smell, the way she stares for just a moment too long at the art in the galleries, the sound of my phone ringing with her happy pictures of her latest global fix, the weight of the bed when we lie together and stare at the ceiling, wordless in a needless quiet. one day, these things will be gone. one day, god will take her away from me. and i will never be able to forgive him for that. FLEMING @ CAUTION 2.0 |
