She watched wine-gold swirls unravel themselves down the porcelain drain and thought of Lady Macbeth. She too wanted to be able to wash her hands of things, of stress, of pain, of life’s intrusive disappointments eclipsing certain hopes, but she knew it was not that easy. She knew that like the slab of Egyptian musk and amber-scented soap that the trauma of realizing the world was not as she thought it was, was not always as it promised to be would take time to diminish. As it whittled itself down to a whiff of distant memory, she would languish both in the parts as pungent as peaches and those bedecked with blood. The fallout of trauma, she thought, always lingers in surprising ways whether it’s a thin film like the silken lather of a guest-room soap or the rich, undying scent of myrrh.

***

http://www.villainess.net/trauma.html

via Liza Kaplan, 29 July 2009 9:49am | |