Still Life with Tornado(2)

A woman walks up and sits down next to me in the bus shelter. She says hello and I say hello and that’s not original at all. When I look at her, I see that she is me. I am sitting next to myself. Except she looks older than me, and she has this look on her face like she just got a puppy—part in-love and part tired-from-paper-training. More in-love, though. She says, “You were right about the blind hand drawings. Who hasn’t done that, right?”

I don’t usually have hallucinations.

I say, “Are you a hallucination?”

She says no.

I say, “Are you—me?”

“Yes. I’m you,” she says. “In seven years.”

“I’m twenty-three?” I ask.

“I’m twenty-three. You’re just sixteen.”

“Why do you look so happy?”

“I stopped caring about things being original.”

When the bus comes she gets on it with me, and to prove she’s really real she stops and slots a token into the machine. There are two Sarahs on this bus. We are going to City Hall.

“We’re eloping,” she says.

I’m conflicted. Is this what eloping with the new me looks like? Riding to City Hall on a bus with myself? How will I ever fool the Social Security Administration if there’s a witness? Even if the witness is me? I try to concentrate on names I like. Wild names. Names that surprise people. I can’t come up with any names. I just keep looking at twenty-three-year-old Sarah and my brain is stuck on one name. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. I can’t get away from myself.





Suit Yourself



I’m stuck on a bus with Sarah who is twenty-three. She has a snazzy haircut and highlights. My hair is still long and stringy like it always has been. It doesn’t stop people from staring at us like we’re identical twins. She’s comedy and I’m tragedy. Even that thought isn’t original.

She says, “You’re not really going to change your name, are you?”

I say, “You tell me.”

She smiles again and I want to tell her stop smiling so much. We have an ordinary smile and it annoys me.

She says, “I’m still Sarah.”

“I’m still going to City Hall,” I say.

“Fine with me.”

“I don’t want you to come with me.”

She smirks. “You can’t even change your name yet. You’re only sixteen.”

“I’m practicing,” I say.

She rolls her eyes. “I guess.”

When the bus nears the next stop, I repeat myself. “I don’t want you to come with me.”

“Suit yourself,” she says.

She gets off at the next stop, and as the bus pulls away, I watch her walk up 12th Street and see she still has our favorite umbrella.

Maybe I’m snapping. Maybe I’ve already snapped and I’m coming back to real life. Maybe this is some sort of existential crisis. I couldn’t tell you right now whether my life has meaning or value. I don’t even know if I’m really living. Either way, I’m going to City Hall. Either way, I’m changing my name.

? ? ?

As the bus goes east, we pass through the University of the Arts campus. This is where I say I want to go to college. Except I’m skipping school, so I probably won’t get to go to college. Or maybe I will. I’m not sure. Going to college doesn’t seem original. Not going to college doesn’t seem original unless I plan to do something original instead of just not going to college.

I thought being an artist would be the right thing to do. Since I was little, everybody told me I was good at it. Every year on my birthday Dad gave me something a real artist should have—a wooden artist’s model, a set of oil paints, a palette, an easel, a pottery wheel. When I was nine, he woke me up every summer morning saying, “Time to make the art!” And I made art. Sometimes I made great art and I knew it because people’s expressions change when they look at great art. When I was ten, after we went to Mexico, he stopped waking me up that way, but I still made the art. Right up until Miss Smith and the pear. It wasn’t the pear’s fault. It was building for months because sixteen is when people stop saying great things about a kid’s drawings and start asking questions like “Where do you want to go to college?”

I just don’t think college is where artists go. I think they go to Spain or Macedonia or something.





Umbrella



By the time I get to City Hall, I figure the idea to change my name isn’t original anymore. The idea is now two hours old. I don’t even go to the sixth floor to get the paperwork so I can practice how I’ll do it when I turn eighteen.

I decide my name is Umbrella, but I won’t tell anyone else. Not even the Social Security Administration. Changing one’s name without actually changing one’s name has been done before, but I doubt anyone else on Earth ever opted to call themselves Umbrella.

I take the next bus that comes around. The rain has stopped, which makes my new name ironic. I am useless now in every possible way. I am a sixteen-year-old truant. I am Umbrella on a day with no rain. I am as blank as a piece of white paper in a world with no pencils. While this may sound dramatic and silly, it’s comforting to me so I don’t care how it sounds. The whole world thinks sixteen-year-old girls are dramatic and silly anyway. But really we’re not. Not even when we change our names to Umbrella.