The Girl Zone: Six. Mimou’s Sea Legs

Young, wild American

Looking to be something

Out of school go-go’n

For a hundred or two

Some asshole broke me in

Wrecked all my innocence

I’ll just keep go-go’n

And this dance is on you

She has a library of things said to her, and in a bad moment, she takes them out, a string of black pearls, holds them against sunlight, beholds the darkness of them, and wears them to bed. A rosary of accumulated wrongs, razors not to cut her, exactly, but intended to make her crack, or disappear, or shrink into nothingness, and hence, to make her the woman she became. She believes the other girls don’t have black pearl necklaces this long and shiny.

Sometimes she takes them out, just to see the black light of them reflected on her diamond heart, knowing, that she can crush the entire thing in a heartbeat, if the mood hits her. But it has taken her a long time to perfect her collection, and while she knows it isn’t healthy, and that she will, eventually, need to let them go, she enjoys, now, knowing, that it is because of these black beauties that her heart is made for cutting ice. Ice, and rock, and those hicks who were mean to her when they should have been nice.

These are but a few examples of her prized pearl necklace:

Insult wrapped in a complement: She’s a nice girl, but I wouldn’t want to go out with her.

Wrapped in plastic: I guess I could have fucked her, had she had a bag over her head.

Unimaginative: You are the ugliest girl I have ever seen.

Unkind: The fact of the matter is, I don’t even like you.

Moronic: I feel sorry for you, I do.

Mathematical: Of course I think you are important, just, not the most important, maybe like, the tenth.

Theological: I feel like I’m betraying God by being with you.

Pointless: Sometimes you can act so stupid.

Comparative: I’ve met someone else, someone – nice.

Rude: Do the world a favor and kill yourself.

Medical medley: There is something seriously fucked up about you/What is wrong with you?/You need to have your head examined.

Judgmental: You are a bad person.

Worst of all: You are the most beautiful and perfect person I have ever met.

Because who can live up to those words? Mimou sure as hell can’t. It is always either the worst of something, or the best of something, isn’t it? But it is easier to rise above an imbecilic snot ball out of a barely coherent ass, than to disappoint the suitor with clouds of misconception in his eyes.

Not all men were assholes. But the sea of insults never seemed to reach its shore either way. If you keep chanting the bad things said to you in your mind, you will, eventually, start believing them yourself, a friend once told her. But Mimou thinks it doesn’t work that way. It is quite the contrary. The vast ocean of uneducated, purposely mean, or plain collateral insults have made her reposition herself in the periphery of all women, as something so formidable, so horrendous, so inexplicable, and so exceptionable, she will need the strongest of all men, a man with steel armor and the enchanted hammer, to muster all his might to make her unbelieve all the things, all the obviously untrue things, someone who will not turn on her the minute things get tough.

Because Mimou is like a jellyfish. Smooth sailing suddenly interrupted by intense pain. First it was she who got burned, but now she has excelled in inflicting pain onto others, as well, even faster, better, harder, stronger, than what was given to her.

Did she meet that man, when she was coming into her own? Mimou always was a late bloomer. And while that man, too, contributed in the string of black pearls, his insults were more intelligent, sometimes, or just as idiotic, at others, they were the ones that really hurt, because he saw her, at least a part of her, for who she was, and therefore, in a recklessly faulty a posteriori thinking, Mimou thought the words had some merit.

Mimou has never had to practice forgiveness as hard as she does now.

The man didn’t leave her, even after she did her damnedest to prove she wasn’t beautiful, that she wasn’t perfect, that she was illogical, naïve, scattered, closed off, emotionally unavailable, and could kick the shit out of him, verbally. And when he didn’t leave, Mimou was stumped. Was it he, who would love her, really love her, and not just say it, and then leave?

Mimou has never had to practice apologizing as hard as she does now.

Mimou did meet the strongest of men. What she caught up on, late in the game, was that with the greatest strength, came massive weakness, too, and it was inside anger, that some people hid their insecurities, just like she had hidden them inside her kindness. It was someone, though, who could take on her baggage, maybe, as well as her present tense. As long as she could come to terms with having fallen in love with an angry person by nature.

Love. A word that comes so easily at first, when it means next to nothing, and later, when the idea behind the word has grown into maturity, is more profound and heavy, it is with a heavy heart that one confesses such a fragile and vulnerable thing to another body.

But she doesn’t forget to deposit her string of pearls for safe-keeping, because she learnt the hard way not to let things lull her into sleep, until she knew what was what.

Inspired by Diamond Heart, by Lady Gaga, from her 2016 album Joanne