The Ostentatious One

When I was younger, I once sat down and decided  what I wanted to be when I grew up. I took out a pen and conjured from my list of characteristics a figure of my imagination. In my mind’s eye, she was the sister I never had. I never wished for a sister, I only wondered what it would be like to compete with one. In her manners, her personality, her seduction, she was everything entirely opposite of me.

This was the woman I drafted.

“The ideal woman is one with short, black hair. Her locks are bobbed and curled in at the ear. She’s coqquetish, intellectual, dangerous. The things she wears are things of casual importance. Her tunics muted in color. Soft, unspoken grays, olives, whites, lavenders, blues, and black. Always, always black. She’s Hepburn at Tiffany’s and Hepburn on a bench in bookish Beatnik cig pants cigarette in hand. When she walks down the streets, there are no songs of angels, only jazz. Men turn their heads, but they get little more than a breeze of her passing stride. Women fume but can only admire her elegance. Old maids, motherly matrons, and rose-cheeked girls simmer and pop like froth in pots all around her, vying to know her secrets. What perfume does she wear?  Dior? Perhaps, she’ll reply but never tell you that she mixes rose water with her own version of Chanel.

Glamour in the flesh. She could bring even Bond to his knees. ”

In all the years I created her, I never gave her a name.

Perhaps it was because I too desperately wanted to be her.

Ostentatious