the World still on hold

still tipsy and I stumbled in through the front door of my childhood home. I hadn't even been drinking bubbly the night before but I sure was. Smiling and giddy, as embarrassing and cheesy as it is, I felt like I had just experienced my first kiss all over again. No..It wasn't the same feeling of that kiss I got when I was 16 (legal age to date when you're raised Mormon) stranded with a 'cute Orange County boy' in the rain, Taking Back Sunday and finding comfort in his black F-150 and the celebration of de-virginizing my lips. It was a little better than that. Maybe I experienced the first kiss that, for the first time in a long time, I actually felt something. What it was that I felt, I didn't know yet, and trust me, I have kissed enough beautiful frogs and felt many a "something" enough lately to know that this, this random unexpected and unwanted yet necessarily welcome butterflies in my stomach (oh my gosh I haven't felt this since senior year of high school) "what the hell was that?" feeling, was different.

Had I been kissing all the wrong people? no. Had I been kissing all the right people? no. Every set of lips I locked, every caress I gave and received, every before during and after I participated in was perfect in that moment, at that time. Necessary? Hell no. Kissing contest stemmed from self-challenge, interest and even boredom? You got it sister. It was in the moment, it was easy it was sleazy, breezy AND beautiful.. Had I become a Covergirl for Western Civilization? perhaps.
Perhaps it was because of the constant ingraining of 'me being like them.' Perhaps the 'oh my god, you totally remind me of Paris and Nicole' got to me and I believed and ACTUALLY BOUGHT IT, not to mention the consumption of greens, silvers and golds gathered guzzled and gone before you could say That's Hot. Perhaps this all derived from never ending comparisons of each facet of my outer shell to them. From the confidence I exuded to the styles I showed on and showed off, even the lining of my eyes trickled down to the way I enunciated my words received a commonality comment. Ages 17-19, I basked in it. Team Hilton Richie were the idols of (m)any I Wish They All Could Be California Girls lives, especially mine. No I didn't admire them just because they were rich and famous and sun-worshipped shopped and smoked their lives away. My mom taught me to do all that years before those bitches even got fake ids. It was that one day in physics class senior year when Jules asked "Have you ever watched the Simple Life? The ridiculous things you do and pranks you pull totally reminds me of that show." Someone like me? Especially bratty fake party girl socialites? No way. I had to watch. Disgust and intrigue met their medium. So yes, I saw myself in them, in the jokes, the witty attitude and undeniable charm, their scripted reality television selves did show some resemblance.
So, like any 19 year old- when told she reminds someone of that hot (mess) topic celebrity- would do, I followed them. I knew the updates, I knew what brands they loved, where they dropped their bills, who they canoodled. I wasn't obsessed, surprisingly, but really. I just glanced, scanned and remembered. Perez helped. Their ways became my generations ways. Blonde and Blonder were our new icons. Everyone was doing it. So we stopped eating we wore the heels and the boots and the dresses and the braids. We smoked it we drank it and we fucked the pain away.

Fast forward three years and why am I still receiving these comparisons? Because yes, I was molded into what the books, the mags and the coolest of films had turned me into. I was still in there, somewhere, it just took that moment where I actually felt something to remind me.

Sunday was beautiful and drizzled all day while I laid under the clouds on my lounge chair in the backyard, giving detail of my anxiously excited fluster to Sadie, that favorite jew of mine.

And it came to pass, it rained and it poured. The world was being cleansed and so was I.