At the back of the mind, where we live now

I thought this email I just finished explained a lot of the thoughts I've had lately, and also who I've always been. Don't ask why I refer to myself in the third person, but it was rather fun to do. And if it is not succinct, at least it is weirdly descriptive. A missive from the chicken coop.

Dear ****,
Stacey is very thankful for your kindness in giving her your delicious pancake recipe. It is not everyone that recognizes the healing and comfort provided by a good pancake, and so Stacey realizes that you are quite special. She went to the doctor and no thyroid cancer, yay! But the visit somehow managed to still be pretty disheartening. Stacey wrote to you last month, but decided not to send it. It was somehow too negative, and she is tired of being negative. But she will tell you the story someday. It has to do with the old theater in *********** in the 40's and a poet put in a straightjacket and is sort of funny and sort of horrifyingly tragic. Stacey has been thinking about something lately. You know what scares her more than the dark, more than being on coumadin, more than Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet? People. What is a 'people' and how do you talk to it? Stacey might not remember. Stacey has spent so much time in the last year being a shut-in and lovingly decorating the make-believe home we each have in our head so as to make it as comfortable as possible that she is one chicken coop short of becoming Flannery O'Connor. How is it then that people will ever visit such a place if no one knows it exists? Her dad was a salesman and her mother has never been shy, so the bullcrap charm factor is not in question and it's always been easy to make a friend. But is there any amount of bulljive in the world that can entice these so-called 'people' to go farther and want to visit a place they don't understand? Since childhood, Stacey has veered between the most intense periods of repression and expression, and she never could decide if it was better to let people who will never agree know that your ideas of what's important are so drastically different, or to keep the structure intact for yourself in that one true place of belonging that exists in the mind only. The structure has been gradually and intricately built since birth and is the only true home that exists. Many years ago Stacey's parents lost their house because her dad had some strokes and they couldn't pay, and she realized then that 'home' had never been a physical place, or even a place tied to other people. Home is that structure in our mind that's made of everything we've ever thought was important, and there is a painful dissonance if your ideas of importance are tiny and delicate with blurred infinite edges instead of huge and finite ones that society understands like marrying a lawyer, having 3.2 children by age so-and-so, making a certain amount of money, lying to people to get that certain amount of friends, etc. It is easy for people to be slightly bemused but much harder for them to understand this different way of building the structure. There is a famous theory by William James that compares the substance and importance of the space between our concrete thoughts to the space between the periods of our sentences. Stacey thinks that's where the real verve of life exists. Stacey would rather talk to people about the feeling of freedom when you are little and you swing SO high on the swing set you might take flight, or talk about the psychological effect of pancakes, or talk about the exact shade of perfect red in Kieslowski's 'Red,' or that the only real sin that matters is to smother the Truth. So how do you tell people the directions so they won't get lost on the way to this weird building? Stacey has no sense of how to do that at this point, which makes those 'people' feel mildly dangerous. But let's tell the truth to Stacey today...how could any little old person and their lack of understanding be as dangerous as dancing with death and then literally walking away almost a year ago? In the end the fear is all foolishness, just wasting time in a life that may not be very long and we know what Stacey has to do. She has to venture forth and put herself on the line, tie herself to the mast, and be willing to go down with the ship if necessary to express that structure. She was never really meant to hide like this, and she knows it. Stacey is a strange bird, but what price glory, ****? Sincerely, Stacey Gunckle