Facade

What she had done, mostly, is try to hide behind a mountain of pretension, piling on layer after layer of subtle meaning and cryptic red herrings, hoping to dissuade anyone who bothers to look, hoping to misdirect the more tenacious amongst them. Like a roaring industrial anthem, she hides a melodic core under thunderous distraction and angry dissonance. She’s afraid that what’s beneath the noise isn’t good enough, isn’t interesting enough, isn’t real enough, and so she tried, desperately, to bury herself in a cacophony of meandering free verse and thoughtful, mysterious little scribblings. She worries that there is a hollowness to it all; she knows that there is such fragility to it that a simple gust of wind will send the entire house of cards crashing down. Even her name speaks to a certain inherent falsehood. Her parents named her, of all things, Lyric. And Lyric is tired of pretending to be more than she is.

Lyric pictures herself, when she pictures herself, as short, slim enough, with ratty black hair and too pale skin and grave gray eyes that seem a little too big for her face. Her lips seem strange, and she will become almost entranced by the way their slow pink fades almost imperceptibly into the white of her flesh. She will stare at them in the mirror, trying to determine where her face ends and her lips begin. Her teeth, she thinks, are too crooked, although they’re less crooked than most peoples’. And while her nose is perfectly acceptable, she is happy she can hide her ears, because one, she accurately perceives, is quite a bit larger than the other. She likes the way she dresses, even if other girls don’t, and she wishes she was more adept with mascara and eyeliner because she likes the way make-up looks on her when it’s applied correctly. All in all, she would say, she is a relatively plain girl, but on the right side of pretty. She is fairly objective in this regard, and feels head and shoulders above other girls her age who seem obsessed with weight and hair and tanning, and she’s never really felt bad about how she looks, which is nice. She’s never felt thrilled about it either, but she assumes indifference beats an eating disorder any day.

Lyric knows she is smarter than most people. This is not braggadocio, but instead, a very accurate hypothesis based on years of field research and reams of empirical evidence. It is also, she notes with sadness, not exactly a ringing endorsement of her intellect, as most people are pretty stupid. She sometimes wishes she wasn’t so smart. She wouldn’t give up what she knows or how she thinks or anything like that. She’d just rather that everybody else was elevated. It would make things easier on her, and maybe keep her from feeling obliged to let Tara Gimble always copy off of her math tests. But things are the way they are and Lyric is bright and most people aren’t and there’s nothing she can do about it one way or another. It’s still annoying, though.

Her hobbies are myriad and too many and the extreme variety in her pastimes precludes excellence in any of them. She doesn’t like this about herself. She doesn’t like flitting from one passion to the next.

She loves music, older music especially, and she has a closet full of grunge t-shirts that her Aunt Sara gave her. She likes that nobody she knows has a Smashing Pumpkins tour shirt, or a Screaming Trees tee or a homemade Nirvana hoodie. Sometimes people think it’s cool that she’s a decade behind, other kids can’t understand it. Adults love it, Lyric noticed, when a teenager likes something that they, the adults, liked when they were teenagers. Her Uncle Steve loves to talk about Soundgarden with Lyric. His wife, Gretchen, was a fan of Hole and L7 and the whole riot grrrl thing. She has an older cousin, Doug, who saw the Meat Puppets play when both of the Kirkwood brothers were alive and well. Lyric makes them feel less old and less lame by sharing their passion with them. She feels this is a valuable service to men and women on the verge of losing their youth forever. Her tastes run similar with books and movies. She feels slightly out of time, and that’s ok with her.

In addition, Lyric is a writer. She is an artist. She wants, desperately, to make something of value and wants her time to be spent just making things, producing things, because she is very afraid of not leaving a mark when she’s gone. She isn’t particularly good at any of the things she does, although she’s not laughably bad at them either. She puts forth a good effort, usually lagging at the end as she becomes bored and longing for something new to do. She has half-written snippets of songs in her head, a shoebox full of photographs she took of old factories and churches, a sketchbook with the skeleton of a teen drama graphic novel, a list of titles for the books she might someday write, and a notepad scrawled over with the seeds of a thousand unrealized projects. In this way, she has constructed a wall of creativity to hide behind. She has, in essence, built a faux persona, an exoskeleton that she crawl into to make herself appear, perhaps, deeper than she is. She can stand behind this pile of potential product and say, with regality, “look what I will make (someday)!” And in doing so she affords herself the role of poet, of painter, of stalwart chronicler of human existence and she allows herself to rest on it, to believe in it, and hope upon hope that she can follow through on something, anything, to substantiate her claims. In reality, she feels she has very little to say, very little to offer and she struggles with what’s behind the superficial charm of witty chapter headings and intricate magazine logos. So the superficiality descends into esoteric puffery, and the false starts and copious notes become increasingly stranger and harder to decipher. This has the added benefit of reducing scrutiny. It’s hard, she discovered, for anyone to objectively judge something they don’t understand. Better still, confusing things had an unintentionally hilarious side effect of forcing people into finding meaning. She found that teachers hated admitting they didn’t understand her papers or her journal entries. As much as they preached the value of substance over style, they were loathe to admit they didn’t actually know the difference. So Lyric’s persona of eclecticism and inscrutability continued to grow, unabated, and before long she began to feel suffocated by the gripping hands of a monster of her own design.

What she wants is for someone to see through her bullshit. She wants to be called to task for the overblown, overstuffed, shambling importance now ascribed to anything she does. But nobody seems to do it.

Lyric writes a column in her school newspaper. She feels like she has nothing of value to say, so she gussies up self-help aphorisms and sub-Ann Landers advice with artistic flourishes and strange linguistic trickery. She adds snippets of foreign phrasings and spellings cribbed from old “Krazy Kat” comic strips. She bends meaning to the point that it snaps and then reassembles it in a completely novel and useless configuration. Then she adds a quick pen sketch that is apropos of nothing to really sell the package. And people love it. It drives her crazy.

Lyric has talented friends who started an online e-zine. Her friend Mitchell writes short stories with plots and believable characters and genuine insights into being a young adult. Her friend Coriander takes beautiful photographs to illustrate Mitchell’s fiction. Her friend Leticia has well thought and intricately reasoned political views. She expresses them with grace and force. Her friend Carmon draws a hilarious comic strip called “Pack-N-Play” about a pregnant teen and her overbearing single mother. And Lyric provides nonsense, day after day. She never knows what to say, so she rattles off stream of conscious beat poetry and simplistic, rambling narratives or bumbling reconstitutions of her dreams into something like a letter, something like a play. It’s all miles beyond comprehension, not because of brilliance or genius, but because if it were reduced to something understandable, it would be absolutely laughable. But when obscured behind barbed wire non sequiters and middling art pretending the lack of inspiration is intentional, nobody seems to notice. Lyric is able, every day, to cram another load of nothing down the throats of her online fans. There are plenty of them. They don’t seem to care that she is, in essence, a sham artist.

Lyric won a scholarship when her art teacher, Mister Monroe, submitted a terrible painting of sparrow that Lyric had made and then hidden behind thick walls of goopy paint and spattered ink that added a dimension of (in the teacher’s words) “sorrow to the malformed shape of a poorly loved songbird.” Lyric felt guilty, especially knowing that her fellow student, Rickie Garamond, had spent weeks on his beautifully crafted rendering of Westminster Abbey only to lose his scholarship to a girl who was so ashamed of her terrible work that she blurred it as much as possible to avoid anyone seeing just how mediocre she really was. Even Rickie believed in her, though. He seemed thrilled to have lost to her. He even mentioned that he wished he could make art on a deeper level than just copying lines in a technically perfect manner. When she received the notification, she wanted to throw up.

She doesn’t watch much television, because she feels it distracts her, although she’s not even sure, now, what she’s being distracted from. She used to like jigsaw puzzles because completing them felt like an accomplishment… now, it’s hard to feel any level of satisfaction from completing someone else’s work. She used to love going to Denny’s at midnight with her friends. Now, her friends and their genuine and increasingly sophisticated discussions of art and literature and cinema only cement her feelings of cultural inadequacy. She hates speaking to them. She’s certain they will see through her façade and realize that she is a fraud, that her whole oeuvre is nothing but a pile of half-realized ideas and warmed over bits stolen from people that are way better at everything than she is. But as yet, they seem to believe in her sketchy, foggy talents and the value of the fluff that she pumps out.

Lyric sits, sometimes, in the dark, racking her brain trying to think of something sincere to say. She tries, desperately, to think of her passions, of music, of movies, of books and replicate that feeling in some way. But everything she does belies a sort of Xerox mentality. She feels incapable of real creativity. And when she does, in those dark moments, think of something genuine, she immolates herself in self-consciousness and burns the idea to the ground with her. If she does it, if she displays herself in a way that isn’t warped by frosted glass or spun through a kaleidoscope, she is certain there will be no doubt as just how mediocre she really is. And that scares the hell out of her. So she keeps up her charade, wondering if anybody will ever point out that she’s an empress and she’s not really wearing any clothes at all.

Lyric wants out, but she’s not sure how. She picks up the phone and calls her cousin Doug and hopes maybe they can go see a show. And she hates the fact that Doug thinks she’s just so cool.