bronwyn "bonnie" killjoy :: [ capitol // 5f stylist ]

this is my coup d’etat
boomerang going from mouth to mouth

Clyde, she has this... sincerity about her. I hadn't ever met anyone like that before her. I haven't met anyone like her since. I guess I thought that kind of person only existed in stories until I saw the way her jaw clenches when she levels her gaze at something with what would just be determination in anyone else and little more. Other people get hard-eyed in those moments. It's not that she never does — she can be ferocious to a fault — it's that when her muscles turn to steel like that, more often than not, her eyes are so open that you could climb right in and tumble down the rabbit hole into her heart. She makes it easy. She makes it enviable.

The moment I met her I wanted to be her. I didn't know why or how and that didn't matter so much. It was just that I thought I would hate everything forever until then. The thing about thinking you're an unfixable person is that you become so committed to the rules of what is and isn't possible for yourself that you think you know your entire life before it has even begun. I knew that there wasn't much out there for me and there wouldn't ever be, but then I met her and suddenly I saw a loophole in the laws of nature. All I had to do was not be me anymore. If I were someone else then there would be different rules. I liked the look of Clyde's rules. I liked the way she was made of armor and openness instead of envy and envy and envy and —

There's a story about a girl who wanted to find her home. In it there's a lion without courage, a man made of metal instead of heart, and a scarecrow with an empty head. I was missing all of those things, just like the four of them, until Clyde put her arm around me and suddenly I had them all. She gave them to me, just like that. She gave those things to both of us somehow, even though she claimed she didn't have them before meeting me either.

It was because of truths like that that I used to call myself useless all of the time, until she started smacking me upside the head for it. She said it made her angry when I insulted her best friend, her brother, her other half like that. I kept saying it for longer than I felt it — useless, useless, useless, abso-fucking-lutely useless — just because it felt so good to be struck by how much she cared about me. There was a part of me that wanted her hand to leave a mark. Of course she didn't hit me like that, but sometimes I just wanted to look in the mirror and see the bright red glow of her handprint or a bruise, a scar, anything to prove I hadn't made her up. Sometimes I take my favorite stories to heart. Sometimes I confuse them for what's real. Sometimes I worry about that.

Clyde never worries about that. She says anything is true if you believe it and she says that like it's a good thing. That's why she's always giving me more books instead of taking them away like people did before her. Novels, picture books, and blank notebooks with a fresh set of pens. She buys them, both old and new, or liberates them from the library or the dusty shelves of someone's home she visited where she thought they looked neglected and in need of a new caretaker. She says it just like that. A caretaker. Me. I can't believe it, but she does and so I won't deny that makes it true.

All that imagination started turning into money at some point. I don't really know how, if I'm being honest. For a while I worked selling tickets at a movie theater and I think I got an equal number of promotions and demotions for talking too much. I was always spoiling endings and plot twists, but if I told people that was okay because it wasn't worth seeing then they believed me and they'd come back for a different show I told them was better. One day somebody asked me how I'd have written a particular movie and after I rambled for what must have been at least an hour or two they told me to quit my job and come work for them instead. On an actual movie set. So I quit. But only because they also gave Clyde a gig with the costume department.

No one knew what my job title was for most of my time there, least of all me. I didn't write scripts the way Clyde assumed I would. Instead I would just point out things that looked or sounded dumb. Clyde sat with me on her breaks, gesturing at stuff and muttering "basic" a lot while rolling her eyes. It didn't take long before she went from hemming dresses and shirt sleeves to approving designs. It became someone's job to take notes every time she said basic, the same way someone took notes every time I called something dumb. It wasn't until the credits rolled at the movie's premier that we saw the words Creative Directors next to our names and something much, much bigger clicked into place for us.

Y'know, people always say the word codependent like it's a bad thing. I think they must be lonely. Isolated. Self-sufficiency always sounded like the real tragedy, someone thinking they only need themselves and swearing that they can be happy all on their own. That seems an awful lot like an excuse to never trust yourself in someone else's hands, for fear that they'll seize the opportunity to snap your neck and drop you. It's okay to need someone. It's okay to admit that you would be less on your own than you can be with someone else. It's not weak to have two backs to carry a burden with and it's not dysfunctional for the world to click into radiant focus when someone grabs hold of your shaking hand to keep you steady. You think Clyde and I are codependent? Well yeah. We're codependent as fuck.