Dear Stranger

I can’t get this Sufjan Stevens song out of my head

This is from a couple of years ago when I was working on “Dear Stranger” as a thesis project at parsons.

I forgot how much time you spend pretending to be something other than what you are when you actually have a social life. I am beginning to resent people for being around. For asking me out to dinner and scowling if I just order a coffee.

Today my thesis teacher was going through the sketches for my “Dear Stranger” book, and she got to a page where the text is:

“I spent weeks starving myself to compete with her
convinced it was the only things she had over me
when he saw me he grasped my hip bone where the fat used to be
looked at me dissaprovingly.”

And she flinched at it, started to respond to it but backed off and decided to pretend it wasn’t there.

She wants me to make the book blue because it’s so melancholy.
I told her that I’d rather make it pink.
Pink for the women who know how to pretend that everything is ok when they’re falling apart.
The women who don’t wear black and grey to tell the world they want to die, but still wake up wishing they had.

Everyone knows that blue is the color of sadness.
It’s a cliche. It’s not real.
When I feel the worst I always wear a dress with flowers on it.
And I paint my nails pink.

That’s my color for sadness.

Sitting in the back of the class when she turns to me and says, “You scare me.”

“What?”

“You’re really nice and all, but you intimidate the hell out of me. You’re half my age and somehow make me feel like a child when we talk. And when you don’t say anything at all you just have this look, like somethings on the tip of your tongue but you’ve decided it’s better if we figure it out for ourselves.”

“Oh.”

Hi. I like building lego towers. I keep M&M’s under my tongue until they’ve melted away because they go too quickly when you chew them. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a rabbit, and every year when my birthday came around I’d be a little disappointed that growing old didn’t mean growing a cotton tail. I like to watch and I don’t like to act. I go through life with only half a plan, but I never leave unfinished what I’ve started.

I stopped talking at some point and started writing because my voice cracks when I speak, and it’s too quiet, no one ever seems to hear me.