Starry Shine

There was a little girl named Starry Shine. She was a simple girl, uncomplicated, a little shy. Most of the time she felt happy and loved to play ball, run, draw, and ride her bike as fast as the wind. Sometimes she felt a little crabby if things were a little difficult, or if her friends or parents were fighting. Often when she was alone, a feeling of happiness overcame her whole body. Even her cells felt like they were dancing. She wondered if everyone felt this happiness. Surely they must, she thought, it's so wonderful. She loved her happiness so much and missed it when it seemed to be hiding, or when she forgot to remember it because she was being crabby. As Starry got older she forgot her happiness more and more. She didn't feel bad; she mostly felt bored, restless and well, you know, always a bit crabby. Now it was only once in a while, when her parents left her alone while they went out, and she turned off the TV and her CD player and the computer and she let her self just be bored that she remembered that something was missing. But she couldn't recall what was missing. She would walk around the rooms in her parents' house looking for that missing thing. "What am I looking for?" she thought. "It can't be anything." So Starry would turn the TV and the CD player and the computer back on. She didn't like being alone anymore and the quiet scared her.

Starry wasn't looking forward to being a teenager but it happened to her anyway. Her breasts grew, she got pubic hair and blood flowed down there every month. She thought the changes in her body were okay but she didn't like how all the girls were boy-crazy. It was only occasionally, sometimes, in the middle of the night when she woke up to go to the bathroom and she still had her eyes shut, that she would feel a tingling all over her body and see her bedroom bathed in a bright white light. When she got up to pee, though, everything would appear as usual and she would drag herself back to bed and she fell back asleep dreaming of being late for class.

When Starry was sixteen and her parents asked her what she wanted to do with her life, she had nothing to tell them except for her standard answer to everything that she didn't have an answer to: "I don't know yet." She tried not to think about it because she had a feeling in the pit of her stomach that was being crabby about everything all the time. She couldn't pin it down, why she felt crabby about everything, why nothing really pleased her. She did feel that the world was a beautiful looking place on the whole, but that everything else was, well, you know, FUCKED UP. She felt that there was something so phony about everything, so weird in an unfun kind of way, but she couldn't exactly understand why she felt this way.

When Starry was eighteen and she graduated from high school, she still felt the same way. She moved out of her parents' house and got a job working at the record store. She dated a guy from the record store and she enjoyed a friendship with him. They lived together for a couple of years, experimented with a few illegal drugs and broke up when she got pregnant. She had an abortion and was more careful with birth control after that. When Starry turned twenty-one her family had a picnic party for her at the lake. While she blew out the candles she thought to herself, "So this is my life." She felt depressed. Is this all there is to my life, to life?"

As time went by, Starry got promoted to store manager. She had good friends, a good life. She ate well and took care of herself. When she thought of her life and felt "So this is it, so this is my life," she tried to mask the feelings of boredom and frustration by being proud of herself and what she had accomplished. Many people her age were having drug or alcohol problems, or barely getting by, so I am doing well, she thought. Once in a while she put aside her proud rationalizations and said to herself, "Okay girl, what's really going on with you, with this thing called life?" All the same feelings were there, you know, the ones like, "This is all so phony and why is everyone pretending so much?" She didn't know what to do about her real feelings so she made up ones: the rationalizing ones, the ones that she allowed herself to be occupied with. Hers was the good life with a proper balance of pleasurable satisfaction and necessary pain.

Starry continued on in this way, not happy, not bad off ... successful in the most obvious explanation of it. When she was close to her 28th birthday she began to feel incredibly restless and frustrated. Normally she was even-tempered, but she found herself almost instantly impatient with any mistakes the staff made. The least little things put her nerves on edge. She noticed the effect this was having on her employees but she didn't care. When one of her favorite cashiers jokingly mentioned that maybe she needed a vacation, she snapped back at her with, "Don't tell me what I need." She felt a growing tension in her that felt like she was going to erupt like a volcano. Nothing could deter this tension; all her usual pleasures only seemed to accentuate it more. She wondered if something was wrong with her, if she was going crazy. Her cousin had a chemical imbalance and she wondered if that could be the reason for her disturbing tension. Starry decided that she needed help and went to a therapist. They went over her issues in her life, but after a while she felt, "So what. I didn't have an unhappy childhood, it was just normal." When she tried to quit the therapy, her therapist told her that she needed to keeping coming if she was to have a real breakthrough. "But, don't you ever feel frustrated, that this isn't enough, that you want more than this?" Starry asked her therapist one day. Her therapist's response was, "You need to keep coming."