Third Place | To Be Delicate is To Be Touched

I wanted to be as pristine and delicate as my things. I wouldn’t have ever described myself as delicate, but a connoisseur of the delicate. Everywhere I went I sought out the gentle flap of a butterfly’s wing, the small petals of the zinnia, my tree sapling I named graciously “Elizabeth”. I worshiped my curation of ceramic fairies and bunnies that sat perfectly poised on my shelf. My mother jokingly called me a hoarder, but in reality I was a collector; a collector of memories, of stories, of merchandise. 

With my plushies laid out in a circle, I would place myself in the middle, a salon of utmost importance, an exchange of words, a bargaining of secrets. Surely they would tell me how to reach this euphoric state of delicacy. 

When I would pray, I would beg. When I begged, I would pray for acceptance, for agreement. I wouldn’t pray for more plushies or figurines, I would pray for my most perfect self. I would lace together my fingers and mumble nonsense at the foot of my bed, trying to replicate the babble of prayers I had heard in church. I could only ever understand the silent response to my prayers as: keep begging. 

I wanted to be a ceramic figurine, a porcelain fairy, an American Girl doll, a stuffed unicorn. Inside I wished to hold the secrets to the universe, the answers to the questions I muttered to my pillow every night. In response, my pillow would echo the soft thumping of my pulse. I tried to decipher it like morse code. If I listened just right I would see a dancer swaying to the steady beat, her lucious movements taunting me with her perfect choreographed movement. Her lips pursed as if about to speak, but she had forgotten how. If I listened too hard, the thumping would get louder and faster to the point where I had to tear away my ears in fear that my pulse would capture me. Some secrets were too grave for a child like me to bear.

I wasn’t fulfilled by being a critic of delicateness. I wanted it to consume my whole being until I myself was breakable. I wanted to be put on the top shelf where the clumsy little girls like me couldn’t reach, but only admire from afar. 

But I learned that to be delicate is to be touched, so in disguising myself in a delicate world, I had to bear its burdens. Mounted to the wall side by side with the butterflies I once knew, in the limp of their wings I could tell there was no secret. This really was the life that I always wanted. The price of delicacy showed itself in the way I cried at my curves but took pride in my bruises. The secrets that I begged for now announced themselves in the way I dragged my body across the parking lot, the way the cold air nipped at my raw feet.

I feared the way my delicacy shattered in my hands. The translucent wings of my figurines, lost to the clumsiness of my prayers and my loose grip. I used to wear floral dresses to the butterfly garden, hoping that they would land on me and whisper an answer to my prayers. Once they did, I would scream and run in fear that their answer would destroy them. Like a bee loses its stinger, the butterfly loses its delicacy, once it had told me how to replicate it. 

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Now, when I go through my boxes of things, I find my collected figurines and statues, wishing I had the courage to give them up. I no longer attempt this illusion of delicateness; it’s transparent, futile. But sometimes I feel it creeping back on coffee dates, on first kisses, the want to be understood in a simple and breakable way to keep people at a safe distance. I feel the girl who wanted that in the way I place two fingers on my pulse to see if it’s still beating. In the way that she pulls my eyes towards every mirror, pulling and tugging at the excess while I wait for the shower to get warm. I see now that she was like my ceramic figures: cracked, chipped, frozen in one place for so long she can’t tell ups for downs, or lefts for rights. I wish I could tell you that I tore her off my shelf, smashed that figurine of myself against the ground into tiny little pieces that I swept up and threw away. Instead I keep her in my boxes just in case she has one last secret to tell, one that could change everything.