Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
Once upon a time there was a crazy fabulous wild and wonderful woman. Her hair was a maze of curls and colour and she was dressed always in the fashion of the day which was lace and satin, girdles and bustiers. She was from the late 1800s. She was not a puritan or a good woman of means looking for a comfortable marriage.
She was an actor and a poet, a burlesque queen who mesmerised the minds of men escaping women they had married who were the opposite of her. Her name was synonymous with Trash and Treasure, in the heady days of the Empire of Kings and Queens and the Aristocracy.
They ruled the day with fashion, food, wine and debauchery carried out in mansions, dance halls, horse drawn carriages and some had the latest modes of transport called automobiles.
Our lady was a Burlesque Queen. She danced in golden halls and rode in carriages cloaked by night with men of reputation. Their wives at home surreptitiously cavorting with the staff in an effort to assuage the knowledge of their duplicitous husbands. Cobbled streets and smatterings of rain created a certain echo of horse drawn carriages as they trotted their cargoes home to pillared homes and grandiose mansions. She was left behind to find her way back from where she came.
As she awoke one morning, fully dressed with her hair billowing unbridled on the stained feathered pillow, she felt as if she was drowning in an aching loneliness which had finally enveloped her like a cancerous disease.
She stood in front of the long extravagant gilded mirror to face herself for the first time naked in her despair. She saw the image of herself wailing back at her. She saw her face contorted in an ugly cry, her heaving and dishevelled shoulders shaking her voluptuous breasts.
This image was one of a woman in torment knowing her life was over. She was too old. The Empire no longer would want or need her charms. Her feet hurt, her girth was thick and the lines on her face were etched so deeply, no sleep or amount of war paint could help her regain her youth.
Because of that it was as if overnight, she knew her raisin d’être had been extinguished.
She was dead to herself. She was no ones treasure and she had become her own trash.
She knew it was time to wash herself, feed herself and redress herself. Call for the carriage and go to work. As she stepped into her worn satin shoes, she looked up and the daylight was brazen in its criticism of her. The light was cold and bare and excruciatingly accurate that no make up or smile could erase the vision of herself caught in the window.
This was the moment to step into the old world or step out all together. Such thoughts were paralysing until now….
A cataclysmic thought attacked her and she knew what to do.