There are two recliners in our living room: The La-Z-Boy…
…and the Lazy Girl. 😉
Happy Wanton Wednesday!
Shatterproof, I am not.
I am melancholy. Restless. Unfocused. I crave the heat of physical touch but am burned to ash by emotional connection.
I am a tempered, crackled pane, and he can see through to the inside of me.
“You are a liar.”
“I’ve always been a liar,” she says with a sly satisfied smile, and he grins like a ghost playing charades with a charlatan, somehow seeing that the tangled twisted temptress is… Well. She just is. She is Brigid O’Shaughnessy (or so she says), and she’s equal parts liar, thief, murderer, and whore.
*
“You are a liar.”
“I’ve always been a liar,” she states with candid conspiracy, gleefully appalled by her own admission.
“Well,” replies an amused Sam Spade, his laugh a huff of unexpected breath, hanging in the air between them.
*
“You are a liar.”
“I’ve always been a liar.”
“Well,” he responds with a laugh, “Don’t brag about it.”
*
I rewind the scene and play it again…and again… And am repeatedly amazed ~ 70 years after the movie’s making ~ at Bogie’s brilliance.
There is crystal clarity in the shaded gray of black and white, in the hard-boiled soft spots of Hammett’s heros, in the timeless noir of 1941. So I lose myself in Bogart’s breakthrough role, in Huston’s directorial debut, in the hijinx of high-living lowlifes, and I seek solace there…
If only for a little while.
Gotta keep it together, even when you fall apart.
Lyrics by Kacey Musgraves, Shane McAnally, and Brandy Lynn Clark
I feel vulnerable right now. Volatile. I’m a wounded warrior who has lost the fight for another’s life, but the arrow has not pierced my heel. Instead, I feel pinching torture of aching loss in my Achilles Heart. And like an injured animal, I act on instinct.
I don’t display the damage done.
I mask my fear.
Hide my hurt.
Stand my ground.
And wait…
I growl.
I snarl.
And I wait.
I wait for someone to extend an arm to me in comfort…
…So that I can sink my teeth into that arm…
…And rip the fucker off.