I Was 27

I was 27 one year. I was beautiful that year — or at least I had convinced myself that I was. There was a man who also thought I was and almost worshiped me for that year that dribbled into a few others enough for a tiny bit of measure. At least he said that he thought that I was beautiful.
“You are so beautiful. You should have been a model,” he said. “I could look at that face for hours,” he continued… on some pictures in a card…after we had parted. He sent me the pictures he had taken of me and wrote on the backs of them. He said that he was crying. Well, he wrote, after he had written that he could look at my face for hours, “…the trouble is, I keep running out of Kleenex.”
He took pictures of me all the time. It was like he was expecting me to leave and he wanted something from which to view so that he could remember how sweet it was — that year that I was 27. He gave me all the duplicates like he thought I didn’t know the way I looked. Maybe he wanted me to see the way he saw me.
I loved the way he made me look in pictures. The way I was looking back at him.
I loved to dance and I danced a lot that year and several before and several after — at a place we used to like to go when I was 27.
He stopped going before I did. And then he moved away.
I think I went back hoping he’d walk in again the way he did when I was 27.
I’m much older now and I keep thinking that I hear people tell me that I should be glad that I had a good year when I was 27 and that that should be enough and it might be time for me to leave now and make some space for someone else. I don’t seem to have a value — there’s no relevance to who I am. I’m not beautiful anymore and I didn’t do enough to count, it seems.
I think it’s because I believe the earth just might not be a globe, although I’ve never said that — I think they might suspect from other things I say. I’m not sure it’s flat but I think it’s fair to ask as many question until the proof is clear. And it’s not clear to me and that makes me a crazy cat lady — in their eyes — and someone who seems to always want to argue. I’m okay with that but it can get kind of lonely not having anyone who sees the way I do and will sit at the kitchen table or wander around the house and talk about it — to wonder what the truth is.
I’ve gotten good at talking to myself and to the cats whenever they will listen. But they are like most people and only want to talk about happy, easy things. Even though we do agree, that’s all they seem to know just how to talk about. They don’t think at all about whether the earth is a sphere or something else — they might not even know they simply walk so softly right upon it. It’s still nice that they look back at me while I am looking at them.
“Meow.”
“I don’t have anything to hide,” she said.
I said, “It isn’t a matter of not having anything to hide. It’s a matter of being herded.”
I guess I’ll have to settle for the cats meows or crickets.
I guess I’m just too old to know that WiFi is essential.
Off this mortal coil it might have to be because I don’t want to live the way they do in China.
It was a very good year that year that I was 27.

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