On Notice

I am this city's worst nightmare, and it doesn't even know it yet.



I sit on the train and all anyone sees is a fat white girl in jeans and a green coat a few sizes too big. They don't know that between my headphones, behind my vague expression, I am plotting their downfall. I have so many tools in my arsenal to silence their complacent sighs--my words, my art, my music, my rage--all the things I have allowed to languish for nine years, all the things I gave away in exchange for my last weapon: my ability to move undetected among them, my fly-under-the-radar strategy. They do not see; they cannot see. I absorb light, reflecting nothing back to them. I am just another lumpen soul on the train to wherever. They cannot see my radiance.



In part this was intentional. I have always delighted in my chameleon, indefinable nature. I walk down Pulaski near Madison and people see my pale skin and assume I must be listening to some soccer-mom radio station; they know exactly as much about me as the people who see me with LJ and assume I'm one of those low-self-esteem white girls who gravitate to a certain type of thug. They are, all of them, entirely wrong. And entirely right, as well. They are right because I sometimes allow their thoughts to become true; I allow them to define me. This, too, has been part of my strategy, and if they never know that I'm actually listening to the same stuff that comes bumping out of their car speakers in the middle of the night, or that I'm actually the most dangerous one in this house--well, then my mission is accomplished.



But there is also, in this silence, this fading quality, the effects of time and grief and fate. I have allowed myself to be silenced beyond what I would wish; I have allowed my attention and my energy to be absorbed without my consent. For four and a half years now I have gotten up every morning and gone to the same place, into the same room, with the same desk and the same view. Every day for fifty-two months now, I have been sucked into the same oppressive atmosphere, fed by the ego of the one in charge and her contempt for all of us below. I am one of the last survivors; of all the people who were there when I started other than the leaders, I am one of six. Four of the others are women over 50. I am the only one of my generation who has managed to survive this dysfunctional little family, in which I am the scapegoat middle child. They do not know that my work holds almost everything together, or that I have deliberately disguised this fact. And so they underestimate, they bully, they coerce. They do not understand the disarray into which I could plunge them at the first whiff of opportunity, or on a whim.



For nine years I have coccooned off my true self--physically, emotionally, and artistically. I could care less about the so-called professional realm; my experience has taught me that it's generally anything BUT professional. And yet it is THAT part of my life that is draining me.



I am not a materialist. I have everything I want right now--a house, and the money to pay the bills it generates. If I could, I would build everything I own with my own hands; lacking that, however, I have very few material desires. I cannot be sold to; I have almost no brand loyalty to speak of. And yet the very act of keeping the things I've so long fought to get demands that I subject myself to the whims of people who revel in their marionette-stringed power. The fight should have been enough, I think sometimes.



I am less a product of my culture than anyone I know--and more, as well. I wallow in the low-regarded forms of entertainment; among hipsters I am the object of scorn, and yet I am all they claim to embody--kitsch, openness, artistry, the willingness to be ridiculous. I've never yet met a hipster willing to be silly; they seem to aspire to an opulent irony, in which everyone can be ridiculed for comfortable complacency except them. I have, to a degree, been guilty of this sin. It is easy to be ironic when the wolf has been chased from the door.



Compared to what I'm living now, I would much prefer the wolf.



I am trapped. I know I am trapped, and I don't entirely understand why; their smoke and pettiness and egotism cloud my air and keep me from thinking clearly, from seeing the way out. That, perhaps, is part of their plan. I have reached my limit, and yet I stay. And it is this that makes me their worst nightmare.



There are some animals, you see, that are docile by design; it is only when you back them into a corner that instinct, claws, and teeth take over, and the unstoppable hunger for escape.



And once they achieve that escape, they can stalk and haunt your dreams.