Where we are all going.

Where are the real people? It’s like asking which raindrop is real, the one I see caught in the light as it hits the puddle or the one on my back I barely detect.

It’s some Friday night event at a salon in a neighborhood where women maybe even my same age are dressed with a sophistication that makes me look like a teenager walking past. On one corner sits expensive clothing boutiques. On another is a clinic for plastic surgery. I would have walked clean past my destination but for the crowd inside. Stepping past the door, the first thing that hits me is that smell… that fake floralish herbaly chemical smell that salons sometimes have. It fits as there are fake people with pencil thin legs and perfect clothes all holding cups of cheap wine. My first urge is to sneeze.

I bail. Take a breather and walk around the block. Less than a ten-minute walk away sits a display of another sort of folk. They’re rough and unpolished. They lift their shirts. They drop their drawers. Drool flows between gapped teeth as a mouth is overstuffed with canned peas. One plays hooligan for the camera while in the background his friends are fucking in the shower. You could say this was the rough, vice ridden side of humanity all neatly tucked between the covers of a book. You could say this was an authentic, unpolished look at people. Do I really wish to believe that, too? Is that anymore real? Is the awkward cavorting of a fat man and an Asian girl trying to fuck and go to the bathroom at the same time more real than the activity I confine to a bed with one man I care about?

I read a story once about a tribe of aboriginals in central Australia who called themselves the “real people”. They let themselves die off because they felt there was no place left for them in this world. But, I’m real. I’m real by my own lights as I lack surgical modification and nail polish. But what about that dyed hair and those shaved armpits? I look at the tiny specks of silver at my hairline. In less than 24 hours they will be gone again, for a time, really. I pull my phone out and check the time. 7:29. Give it one more shot.

To the model flaunting fashion on her fine body at the salon, she is real. I find someone to talk with about movies. Perhaps because my conversation leaves her out, one of the models singles me out for attention. I must look at her dress! She cannot wear underwear or it would ruin the line! I tell her to wear a g-string and turn back to my conversation. She comes back wearing some beaded affair (which really is cute) and grabs my scarf to get my attention. The scarf is blue and fuzzy – I tell her it’s genuine hide of cookie monster. I gotta wonder what exactly they’re paying her for. Does she really think I’d put on an outfit like that? Is it any wonder men get confused every which way by the signals women project? Whoever is picking her outfits can’t seem to find a skirt short enough! I had a doll when I was little whose hair could be pulled out of a hole in her head to make it longer (“Chrissy”). I imagine this model going into her changing room and someone yanks at her ankles, causing more leg to extend from a plastic vortex where the rest of us women have hips. Either that or her vagina is in her armpits and that’s why I can’t see it despite all that is revealed by this cute little denim affair she spins around in, to finish the evening.

Can you imagine if every raindrop had an ego? What a mess. But we are that mess - all so different it’s exhausting to truly judge. All pressed together closely on a late bus northward by the relentless storm, we are young girl who talks too loudly, gay man in hot clothes, older woman who really just wants to tuck her nose into her book of stories, black woman and her little boy who crawls and wriggles in his seat just trying to see past all the rain. Just trying to see where we are all going.