The Femme Fatale in Brown Paper Packaging

When I was maybe seventeen, I drove my older brother, who didn't drive, to a pottery for a visit. A place he wanted to apprentice. We were met by a young man, a little older than us, who showed us around.

He wasn't warm or friendly and I assumed he had taken a dislike to me, or to us.

Later, after my brother began his apprenticeship, I found out this man thought my brother and I were a married couple. And that he found me very attractive.

I always remembered this because it showed so clearly that you just can't know.

Sometimes now men look at me like I am a radiant beauty, or possibly I am vibrating in such a way that I am not quite in focus for them and they are dazed. Or maybe they are stunned and terrified by my insanity!!!

There was a man here who used to looked at me that way, sort of stunned or dazed. I joked with myself once that he was young enough to be my son, fifteen years my junior. Then he told me his mom gave birth to him when she was sixteen. I laughed out loud, even though it really wasn't funny.

As I was heading to bed last night, I was joking with myself that I was a femme fatal in brown paper packaging. Because I seem to be very into the soft brown of paper bags and I have a lovely old notebook with soft brown paper that has a beautiful smoothness to it that I have been drawing on.

Beauty is an odd subjective thing and people can be very foolish about it and often very unkind.

Brown paper packaging.