2003-07-05 - 10:49 p.m.

Transcribed from paper journal...

The fourth of July is officially my least favorite holiday. I have little if any patriotism in my blood, and I don't like loud noises.

I remember the fourth of Julys of my childhood, barefoot on the patio, asking Dad to light black snakes which left little black circles on the pavement. I couldn't wait for dark to come. Mom would make fruit salad and American flag cake. My grandparents would come over and we would all sit in a row of lawnchairs on the driveway. Dad would set off the fireworks, which we would have taken a trip days earlier to pick out. My favorite was a low-ground one that changed colors and bounced around like a small crazed animal. Dust favored the classic roman candle. I would hold sparklers, which made my mother nervouse, and they always glowed the brightest the last second before they burned out.

I stopped loving the Fourth of July when my parents got divorced.

The only other fourth that really stands out in my mind as a time that I enjoyed myself is my sixteenth summer. That was the mad tea party summer, the summer when the starlight girl, the raincloud boy, the elfling, and I were inseparable. That was before the tension. Before secrecy and lies that were not called lies because they were broken pieces of a much larger truth. Before an incident that caused a falling out between the raincloud boy and the elfling-- an incident that was never explained to me. Before the raincloud boy and the starlight girl and I became some sort of love triangle, though I didn't know what it was until it was too late and I was the odd one out.

It's funny how there can be times, pockets of something like perfection, at least from the perspective of five years later and a completely different setting. I was happy then. I was.

But I was also anorexic then, and in denial. I was diagnosed at the end of that summer. I remember the three of them wondering why I didn't eat, why I didn't snack when they did. I don't know if they suspected the truth, or if, like me, they assumed eating disorders were things that other people developed.

There are no pictures from the mad tea party. I wish there were. It's such a clear moment of carefree summer life, of teenage friendship, such an isolated moment of an otherwise complicatedly torrid history that there ought to be photographic evidence, proof that these people existed, and were happy, and platonic, and thoroughly enjoyed each other's company without any tension (sexual or otherwise).

I did recently look at another picture of me from that summer. Me, sitting on top of a hill with my knees up, grinning from ear to ear. I look happy. But I also look like I don't know where I am, like I can't rest on that hill, like I might fly at any moment, a fragile bird perched for one fleeting moment on a suspended wire above the street.

I look fragile, that's for sure. It's not a picture you glance at and see right away that something is wrong. It's like a puzzle. You have to concentrate, keep your eyes on the picture until you see the problem.

The calves are what give it away. I was sixteen, and I was happy, but to look at me you'd think you could have snapped my legs in two with one quick movement.

Faery drawing by Brian Froud. Border pattern by Infinite Fish. Designed by Dust.