Missing The Point.

She turned up the radio as she placed her elbow on the warm driver’s side window. Traffic was going no where in a hurry and she was late to work, again. Her opportunity to avoid being late had been consumed earlier that morning. She’d spent fifteen minutes standing in her mismatched underwear in front of her closet. She had stared longingly at the cute clothes she wanted to put on: a tank top, some cut-off jean shorts, a cute vintage vest. But it was Ugly Monday, a day that wouldn’t allow such things. In those fifteen minutes, she’d used every bit of rationing she could to get herself to push some clothes aside and find a skirt and jacket, suitable “Monday Gear”, to then get her to the next phase of the morning: hair and make up. She pushed. Pushed again. And pushed one more time until she found a skirt she felt she could manage living in for eight hours. She reached for the skirt’s wire hanger, but the hanger had turned into an unruly four-year old who’d just been told it was time to leave the playground. The hanger didn’t scream, of course, but it hung onto another hanger like a kid with a strong hold on the jungle gym. She tugged. She wrestled. She cursed. She negotiated. She gave up. Kinda. Angry, she stomped her un-manicured foot and she started to rearrange her closet so that this would never happen again! How dare her closet make her late? Bad closet, BAD! She rearranged for a gooood seventeen minutes. Still in her underwear. Still nowhere near hair and make up. Still just not anywhere near close to leaving for work. (This sorta thing happened often her life. She was working on it. Just not today.)  Once she was satisfied with the tidy effects of her scolding, she had jumped into her gear, ran across her parking lot in bare feet with heels in hand and jumped into the car thinking somehow she had won. …

Through her amber-tinted shades, she glanced up at shadowed palm trees towering in the hazy morning sun. She leaned her head back and tried to allow the sun’s warm fingers to massage her temples as she sang along with Christina Aguilera: “I am beautiful…in every single way…” A tear slid down her face. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel beautiful; she knew that she was, just not all the time. Like right now. She didn’t bother to wipe the tear away. Instead, she lifted her head from its comforting place and reached for her make-up bag on her lap. She slid on a smooth glide of lip gloss. She didn’t need a mirror. She’d had years of practice of getting beautiful in the car. But, to make sure she didn’t look like Jennifer Coolidge in “Best in Show”, she took a glance. As she made eye contact with herself, she knew she shoulda promised herself something else, something remotely encouraging, but instead she promised herself, “No more wire hangers!”.