Weird

I had a thing for quite some time. Not too many people know about my thing, well, because……it’s weird. Now currently I am not too afraid of weird- I am actually more comfortable in the place of “not normal”. This is definitely why I have spent a lifetime wondering what it would be like to run off to the circus (if we could get rid of the animal abuse) and pierce my body and cover it in tattoos that say “stay weird”. I would be the ringmaster or maybe the lone, stealthy acrobat if I wasn’t afraid of heights. My love for the strange also manifested itself in the years I have spent reading Mamet and Shakespeare and standing on tiny stages baring my soul for the two audience members. (Yes, that happened once. Two people. They were both related to me.) It is also why I often want to dive right out of my own skin when life gets a little too normal and suburb-ish and mundane. Bursting into song or one of Shakespeare’s sonnets or simply putting on my best voices for Pete the Cat bedtime stories all help shake off the boredom. Gotta keep stretching for colorful and edgy and “very not normal.” Like I tell my babies, don’t be afraid to fly your freak flag high and proud. Life is too short for beige. Beige makes people lose their minds.

I used to talk in stars.

Let me unpack this for you.

I remember the obsession starting quite young. Words were like a beautiful little flock of chickadees to me. I was constantly trying to pull them together into shapes and details while they fluttered and tweeted around my head in a gleeful game of keep-away. I loved that dance of making sentences complete: subject/predicate. This was intensely satiating to me especially when we got to underline the subject and circle the predicate with our #2 pencils on our ditto-copied 2nd grade worksheets. I found huge release in putting anything to paper. Phew- gather those babies up and put them into a nice little paragraph shape on that boring, BEIGE, wide-ruled paper. Well done, Cecily. A+. Gold star. And that’s when I started the game of stars. If words could be formulated into intricate little paragraph-y shapes on paper, then I could make shapes when I spoke them.

By the age of 9, every sentence that came out of my mouth was quickly recalibrated in my brain to make sure it could fit into my star pattern- 5 syllables. Each line of the star was a syllable. If you needed more, you better make sure it fit into two or threes stars- 5, 10, 15, 20 and onward until my brain was a speckled mess of constellations shining brightly in the dark night sky. Star-talking was a brain game, and I could do it so quickly I no longer even needed to count my word parts. I could just feel them. I then started to take other people’s stories and words and work furiously to configure all of it into billions of my beloved 5-sided shapes. I would listen, draw my brain stars and toss them up into the velvet, navy folds of my brain. Then I had my very own little picture of exactly what I was feeling inside and what you might be feeling inside, too. I was a family party trick, and I loved every minute of it. “Wait, let me count. 1-2-3-4-5, holy crap she did it again!!” I was so proud of the pictures I could make with words. I always hear parenting advice on how “children need structure”, and I guess I created my own. Mine was word structure -found and lost in the stars.

I quit formally “star talking” when I became a teenager. Right about the time when weird is just weird and you best lower your freak flag a fair bit before everyone sees. I thought it most appropriate to throw a blanket over my stars and layer up in sunshine and lipstick so I could get straight A’s and be a doctor someday and all the things that would make me an actual star. I’m not a doctor, well, except, maybe “dr. strange” and I rarely wear lipstick anymore- it typically makes me look like Marilyn Manson (who does corner the market on awesomely weird). That is also about the time I completely quit writing for pleasure. Funny how we let those glorious little odd pieces hide away until they just can’t anymore. I hit 40 and realized I was already my own star and it was time to dust if off and let her shine. The tagline below my email reads “Chase your stars, fool. Life is short.” -Atticus (a favorite poet of mine). Add it up, baby. That’s a couple of complete stars right there. See how the Universe just starts hitting you over the head with your true and weird? Life IS short, I suppose, and time runs out for fakery and falsehoods. You just can’t cheat your stars anymore.

Next time you talk to me I’ll be taking apart your little pieces and placing them into a nighttime sky pattern in my brain while sharing all of my sparkly stars with you.

Or maybe I won’t.

That’s for me to know.

and you to find out.

Fly your freak flag high.

Beige is boring, love.

xoxox