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V A L E R I E
VALERIE KNOWS THERE is something different about how twilight has settled in the coastal air this summer's precipice, so she tells it something she has never told anyone. She sees herself in the third person.
She doesn't know why, or how to change it. She doesn't want to change it. Thinking of herself as performance art gives her life a value that merely existing in an empty space doesn't have. Recording the act of breathing means she can note how to fix it; rehearsing it means she can one day perfect it. When people talk to her, she often forgets to listen to their words, preoccupied with what reaction would best suit them. Upon every greeting, she already thinks about them watching her walk away. She imagines every wall she passes is a hall of mirrors, so she, too, can see what they are afraid of looking away from, what she needs to extract from herself to remain consumable.
Nobody can say it doesn't work—she never shifts on her feet, she holds her head high, her voice carries to Vancouver, and most of all, she always looks impeccable. Even when crying, even when angry, even when asleep and still aware of it. The thick velvet curtains only shield her from the audience once her consciousness teeters away.
And what a pretty picture she is making tonight, she thinks, reviving the image of sultry Augusts she hasn't lived. Under the aging maple in the Secret Gallery's courtyard, the lithe redhead in a black lace bustier, her table littered with the proof of another evening wasted: the empty bowl of Greek salad she's tried hiding from view, the old copy of A Streetcar Named Desire that she's been carrying on her person weighed down by a ceramic ashtray she isn't using but has kept for composition, her Shirley Temple and the cherry on top of it.
Lounging in a wrought iron chair with her legs stretched out onto the cobblestone, Valerie picks up her drink and pinches its straw between her painted lips; the condensing glass drips water into the creases of her palms like mapped out canals, and the sun ebbing under the courtyard's boundary walls speeds the process up. Soon, her grenadine will be diluted with melted ice, but it doesn't stir her. She will pretend it is as sweet as ever if it means being suspended in the beauty of the moment for longer. Maybe she looks like an unsolvable mystery. Maybe she looks like one they can see through. As long as she doesn't look like what she is, in the end—a girl, idle, playing pretend to pass time she has too much of.
Valerie picks up Streetcar andflips through its dog-eared sepia pages as mosquitoes serenade her. The words blur, the light's too dim. The only illumination aiding her is the sunset's falling glare—a soft, tinted green because of the ivy covering the courtyard's eroded brick—and the feeble blink of the fairy lights spiraled around the maple's lanky branches. And so she lets her memory of the play guide her, all the while thinking of the roles she's embodying as she sits here and sulks:
