to be ugly

(in a different house)

assembled in 1996

to be different Everyone was mulling around, making small talk, laughing, having fun, doing all the things that people are supposed to do at a well-executed party. It was his birthday, and there was a ring of people around him. He was glowing with delight. She looked at him from across the room and realized that he might have loved her, but he knew nothing about her. She looked down at her dress. It was a strapless red satin dress, with sequins bordering the top and bottom. She suddenly wanted to be wearing her flannel and long underwear, sitting by herself with a book, or a newspaper, or her thoughts. She just wanted things to be different.

too much light too much light makes the baby go blind and too much light makes the moth rush into the flame and die in a final glorious blaze of glory and I have seen the light and I have seen it what is my choice: burn in the flame to burst quickly to die young or to slowly slip away to die slowly day by day to let people in darkness ull me in inch by inch until the light kills me

train tracks I walk up to the train tracks. It is daylight, but the sun is behind the clouds. The whole sky is a blue-grey. The grass in the field is brown. It feels like straw. It scrapes my ankles when I walk through it. I walk on to the rocks that surround the tracks. It is hard to walk on them. My feet keep slipping. I look up. There are trees on the horizon. They don’t look real. They look too small to be real. They look like toys. I look at the train tracks. The wooden rails are wet, even though it hasn’t rained for days. I step over onto one of the rails. I start to walk down the tracks on the rail, like it is a balance beam. I quickly lose balance and fall. I look at the condition of the wooden rail. The edges are no longer sharp and sturdy: they are worn and soft. I see a pill bug crawling out from a crevasse in one of the rails. I choose not to get back up on the rail and try to balance. I walk along the side. The wind picks up. I don’t feel like buttoning up my coat, so I overlap the edges around my waist and hold them down. I feel the wind and hear it hiss as it hits my ear and curls around. I realize that this is the only sound I have heard there. I look at the slats between the rails. They look like they are about to fall apart. I can’t fathom that these tracks would be able to support a train. But then again, I don’t remember the last time I saw a train on these tracks.

Two Minutes With Ayn Rand don’t believe in things that aren’t proven, that we have no evidence of, but sometimes, sometimes, I still think about what I would do if I had two minutes to talk to you when someone asked me what I’d say I said I’d rather hear you speak I’m sure the words you would part unto me would mean infinitely more than what I could say to you and if I could talk to you I wouldn’t know what to say But I know I’d have to tell you like so many of your fans in the past that I thank you for showing me that there are logical people in the world that man can live by reason that reason is a virtue that selfishness is a virtue that I have a right to what I earn to what I create to what I know to be true I would have been still searching blindly for philosophical answers to the meaning of life if you never told me that I am worth something that I am my own end and it’s nice to know that even when I’m surrounded by these unthinking masses that there are people who hold their minds as the highest value out there somewhere in the world and the fact that they exist helps me through my days but you knew that you wrote about these heroes over the years and how could you manage to write gripping, thousand-page novels about heros that a rational mind can’t help but love and did you really find that hero in real life? because I’m still looking. You’ve created these heroes but are they just created does anyone else understand these values as I do? Yes, thank you for giving me the answers I’ve been looking for, but tell me that someone else out there found the answers too so maybe, if those who posed this unreasonable illogical ethical question in the first place, if they could give me another two minutes so you could do some talking maybe then you could explain to me how to get through the days when no one understands you how to accept less than perfection when you’ve seen the purity and the clarity of the thinking mind

ugly house or how a place holds a feeling This is an ugly house. I hate the wallpaper in the spare room. Those stupid miniature rooms on the shelves in the spare room, stupid ugly miniature rooms she made, why would anyone want a box of a miniature room anyway? She takes up all the space in there, gets mad at me when I put a flower arrangement in there. I’m sleeping in the room, let me at least put something in there so I don’t feel like I’m sleeping in a hotel that chose a decorator with no taste. Why does she have so much stuff anyway?? She’s got a third of her jewelry and half of her clothes there, and I’m the one who sleeps in the room. I hate the multi-colored carpet in the living room, the barrel chairs with turquoise and melon vinyl coverings. The ugly statues mom is drawn to. A statue has to be inherently ugly for her to like it, I think. The lights hanging from above the bar, the lamp shades are Harvey’s Bristol Cream canisters. That mural of the 5 kids above the couch. I’m at the bottom. I look ugly. It was when I was subordinate and meek and stupid and helpless. Like now. I hate the stained glass hangings in the kitchen windowsill. And you can see the black paint chipping off the refrigerator door so you know mom tried to cover up the turquoise. Silk flowers that look really crappy. The kitchen flowers are the worst. I hate the wood-branch-tree she decorates for any pagan season she thinks of, even if it’s not pagan, let’s decorate the tree anyway, no one will know the wiser. Or the fact that there are nice things in the house, like two Dali prints, but they look ugly here. Art even looks like trash in this place. I hate the lamps hanging in front of those ugly melon colored front doors. And that wind chime hanging from the lamp in the front hallway. That rock garden in the front hallway, it used to have a working fountain in it, but I was too little when it worked, but that’s okay, because I think it would be even more frightening with water running down it. And I hate the playroom, the room i’m sitting in now, look at how cluttered it is, all the jewelry she’ll never get around to selling, all the fabric for clothes she’ll never make, all the exercise equipment that collects dust because she feels she can WALK her way to a perfect body. You know, she doesn’t like me using the treadmill because she thinks I’ll wear out the motor. What difference does it make? Books she’s collected because I collect books. She wants this of mine, I owe her this, I adopted this from her... She’s so petty, and no subtle hint I make makes a difference. She slams on any idea I ever have. She makes me feel I can never be creative, because it won’t work out. And she wonders why I’m insecure. Don’t you get it? You made me this way, I hate what you’ve done to me, I hate what you’ve become, and now I have to sit here and live with you, in this ugly house. And when I move out I’m going to still have to live with myself, with all this insecurity, with all this anger. And I’ll still have the memory of this house in my mind.

Copyright Janet Kuypers. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission.

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