What Are Real Writers Wearing This Season?

I want roses on my head: silver tissue roses, watered silk roses, roses made of pixels and memory -- and real roses, too: tea rose scented, spicy, musky, wildflowery, hint of apricot, hint of snow. 

 

I want a crown, a dragon with a ridged back made of Indian arrowheads, its claws reaching down onto my forehead, each tipped with a ruby, its dragony tail in its mouth, completing the circle.

I want a wand tipped with a star that is also a heart that is also a giant bubble perpetually on the point of bursting.

I want ruby slippers. I want striped tights. I want a sea-foam tutu that flounces and glitters, and a cape of white peacock feathers. I want a satin corset that laces up the back, black, with understated trim the color of raspberry parfait. I want a sash of jingling coins and cowrie shells, strung together with spider silk and cranberries. I want diamond chain mail, and anklets with platinum spikes, and, snaking up the backs of my calves and thighs, henna vines with blooms revealing, at their center, eyes that open and close. 

 

I want to be holding a big green bowl of bright yellow lemons. 

 

I want a barn owl on my left shoulder, and a clever blue parrot on my right, and a hawk with a raven's soul perched on my wrist. 

 

I want a rain check and a magic mop. 

 

I want the whole show, me myself and I, and everything we imply, projected onto, into, nature: a dark volcanic island close to the mainland, but separated from it by channels of sluicing water, ice slush atop every wave and rainbows in the spray, and, right in the middle of the island, a round pool fed by hot springs, and everywhere the softest moss and the sharpest evergreens and the chill clear sky of possibility.

Never mind that all of this would be too much, would look ridiculous if it were possible to achieve, which it isn't; never mind that I would collapse under all that weight. 

 

At the heart of it: exuberance and greed. Wanting it both ways, wanting it all ways. Wanting.