Why do your keys make so happy a jingle on a dull day in March? like a puppy dog at the door, welcome! welcome! it's a good day! hello! you're home! Forty-eight years old and I slouch with my knees apart like a cowboy if a cowboy was a middle-aged woman in artificially distressed denim and dirty hiking boots. What's important? Love and art. Forty-eight years old and I swagger with my wallet chain chiming against my box-cutter like spurs ching! ching! like a cowboy if a cowboy was a rejected product of the unraveling American middle-class. When did I last watch the sun rise? decoupled from time and space because it can't be rushed, can't be squeezed in between errands and dishes and feeding the cats, because there's no app to replace it, because every single one is unique, because it'll never come again. Forty-eight years old and I sigh when the weight of old pain and everyday grief feels too heavy on my back like a cowboy if a cowboy was a bird-beaked old woman trying to do the right thing without a guide, a tutor, a mentor, a helpmeet. Who am I isn't a question I can afford to answer when nobody is good enough to earn a living. (The interest would kill me.) Forty-eight years old and I'm finally the person I wanted to be at fourteen. If I'm invisible it's because I choose to be invisible. If I put up with someone's shit it's because I choose to put up with their shit, for love or money. I don't have to, I choose. I survive. like a cowboy if a cowboy was more than an old-fashioned symbol of self-reliance, independence, substance, courage, and strength, more than a man whose character, in accordance with stereotype, was honed by adversity, a man who doesn't care about the show but about the story it tells, a man who understands that it's not about the having of it, but the earning of it, a man who lives in no man's shadow, a man whose cares are etched into every line on his face, in his limp, his swollen joints, in every gray hair, every wrinkle, every mole, a man who doesn't complain, but keeps on walking, keeps on working, a man who shapes his life with his hands, if a cowboy was an American ideal that even a forty-eight year old woman can aspire to in a dusty dry-room shifting banana boxes from one place to another. It's not that I wanted to be a man, it's that I wanted to live up to masculine ideals.
April 3, 2022
