Degas girl, Schiele girl

People often ask her if she is a ballerina. She tells them yes, she dances.

A man once leaned out of his car and told her she was painted by Degas. A John sent her a book of Schiele and signed it, he would have died to paint you.

She dreams a lot. Remembers every detail. She wakes up exhausted: her lover found a miniature eagle in her ear and let it go like a child losing a balloon. In another, a man had kidnapped her in his car and a weathered, spooky doll fell down from the roof between them and told her, in harsh whispers, how to kill him to free herself. The spirit inside the doll was a woman this man had murdered. He couldn't see or hear the doll. She ran from the car on gravel that changed to sand and the beach was safety. She was afraid of what the doll was going to do to the man. When she woke up she made her own doll. She burned incense to thank the murdered woman who helped her escape her nightmare.

People often ask her if she is a ballerina. She tells them yes, she dances. Friends have called her stripper, hooker, whore, and she answers, yes, she dances. All the same to her- ring around her life, scars and pockets full of secrets, preciously lived experiences. She is the richest of them all.

Her therapist says she is a baby witch who won't accept that she can't yet play with her mother's cauldron. She keeps burning her hands She needs to be like a tree in the storm, never resisting the sway or the shock.

She heard the chirping of finches and mourning doves outside of her window that night that turned into morning with her lover holding his fist above her face, threatening to bring it down, hard. She remembers being a child and feeling so happy she was a girl.