I’m always a bit disheveled, slightly askew.

Take my pant legs for instance, one is fallen. Stitch witchery doesn’t like being washed too much. I have scuffle markings all over my shoes. Collars never lay pressed in a uniform manner. My necklaces refuse to stay pretty-side out – to face the world. Oh no, they flip, so the backside is viewed in tarnished glory.

Disheveled, that’s me, never prim and proper. You would never find me in a fashion magazine. I’m Just a putz, always with a scrape, bump or bruise somewhere on my body. Most of them gotten because I was trying to keep up.

I think it’s partly because I have two older brothers who kept me in the “wanna” mode. I wanna play baseball with you, I wanna ride bikes with you, I wanna go to your piano lessons with you. I wanna keep up with you. I wanna do things like the boys. Thus, I was a rough and tumble tomboy dressed in pretty pink dresses – separated from them by age and sex.

Shame is the badge of dishevelment. Owning the best clothes or best shoes is best left to the prim and proper. Not to size 11 feet and 4X body. Oh no, if I wore Jimmy Chue’s, they would rip and tear in the first breath out the door.

Give me Crocs and a t-shirt and I’m good to go. Comfortable I like to be, but never really am,
‘cause I’m always a bit disheveled.

I look at the doll I’ve set aside.

Meme is sitting on a chair where I can see her when I choose. The clever way she sits there, sets my ire up. She’s an empty doll with nothing on the inside. She’s hollow like the tin man, no heart, no real expression, frozen in time, looking straight ahead, at nothing. I can’t even pull a ring to make her sing, “if I only had a heart.”

She’s as empty as I am full.

I am overstuffed with fluffy innards. My full cherry cheeks hide the wrinkles that were there when I lost the 45 pounds that have returned where they belong. That is one part I do like about being fat. I guess if I got thin, I’d have collagen implanted.

It’s funny where vanity hits. I care about the wrinkles, but not the overlapping belly that thwarts me from picking up a dime.

Perhaps my belly has become a comfortable friend. It fulfills a purpose.

Vanity is in the mirror when I see facial hair on my chin, taking away my femininity. I lay on the cot now as electricity is shot into my skin and the hairs easily plucked from with their root, shocked to death, as I pretend that youth has not left as quickly as the jolt.

But, the belly that keeps me from sitting in a booth, the one that allows me to keep men at arms length. No, that doesn’t embarrass me, it’s the chin hair and wrinkles.

How odd.

The hair and wrinkles I may be able to control with a dollar. Belly fat has a life of its own. It’s not something I can cut away, wash away or shock.

So what do you think Meme?

I am full.

Full of shit
Full of fear
Full of pain.

I wear it just like my disheveled clothes, always, parts of me, a little bit askew, so I don’t enjoy the moments.

And, she just sits there empty.

Stupid doll.
Stupid me.

When did that happen anyway?
When did I become the one full of self loathing? When did I make the decision that I am somehow best left in the scratch and dent section of the dollar store. When did I become second hand and somehow unworthy.