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epitome of incomprehensibility
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It started with mice eating a rat, but I remember very little of that, except that the rodents were running up a white wall in a middle-class house and I was thinking smugly about role reversal.
Memory, detailed, kicks in at me sitting in a black folding chair, close to Lady Gaga who sat facing me. We were in a basement student theatre with black walls. She crossed her legs. She was wearing a white dress, her hair dyed platinum blond - her fifties femme-fatale incarnation.
She was also in one of those moods where she takes herself too seriously, and I was smiling as she said, "I am going to be..." (dramatic pause) "foggy."
I nodded. Okay, Lady Gaga, you're going to be foggy. I'm sure. She had her hand lazily extended as if holding a cigarette, but it wasn't, so what happened next made sense only in light of her announcement. A grey cloud of smoke emanated from her, enveloping her and then me.
I wasn't smiling, and the world was black and white. In a bathroom, when I looked in the mirror, I saw another face appear in the mirror, leering, behind mine, growing larger, and I shocked myself into grey dozing, aware of my shivering nerves. Launching back into black and white dreams, now in my black-and-white bedroom, I kept seeing faces appear behind me in mirrors. It was as if I willed them to be there. The shocks lessened as I told myself this was a stereotypical horror-movie trope. I wasn't going to keep being scared at a cheap trick.
I jumped out of bed and willed the world into colour. Out of my closet I took red-burgundy boots based on real life (too high-heeled to be practical, so I usually keep them in the closet) and donned a wide-brimmed straw hat adorned with a flower-pattern ribbon and purple cloth carnation. Wide-brimmed for a reason: so that when I looked in the mirror the hat would block any ghostly faces that might appear behind it.
Then I decided I needed a miniskirt. The dream-copy of my real life purple skirt with a circle pattern wasn't short enough, so I conjured up a hot pink one and wriggled into it. My legs became long and tanned. The top, I was sure, should be a tan-coloured bra adorned with red duct tape. When this outfit was complete, I jumped out of the window onto the neighbour's now-flat brown roof, brandishing a fake, grey plastic machine gun in each arm. "See how you like that, snow, " I thought, and the snow began melting, because snow doesn't like Lady Gaga. But it's lonely at the top.
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