Cocoon Crash
To Know Who I Am
Title: Cocoon Crash: To Know Who I Am
Author: mao
Disclaimer: I don't own the members of the Goo Goo Dolls, their instruments, their music, their thoughts, ideas, past, anything about them at all. I wrote this purely as an exercise in writing and take full artistic license here. The title of the whole piece comes from a song by K's Choice of the same name. The title of this part comes from the song "Iris".
Author's Notes: This is a sort of Romeo and Juliet story with attitude and less death. I reformatted it so it would be easier to read.
Warnings: None yet.
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Have you ever had to choose between two things you really want? To make it simple, say...on a hot day, an ice cream sundae or a ride home in a taxi. The sundae, sticky sweet with melting vanilla ice cream, walnuts you can almost feel crunching in your teeth, chocolate sauce like a liquid orgasm. Or the ride home - you could walk, but the eight miles home would be easier in the air conditioned space, smelling of a vanilla or pine air fresheners, leaning back in the soft seats, your feet resting easily.
If you choose the sundae, you'll cool yourself for a while, but you'll ruin your appetite for dinner, and you still have to walk home. If you pick the cab ride, it's more likely that you'll be squished in the backseat with an elderly woman who wishes to show you pictures of her hideous grandchildren and a stock broker with a wife and kids in Jersey who gropes you at stop lights. So what do you choose?
You make decisions like that every day, with your last five bucks. With your pocket of change - do you scrape it together to buy a magazine or a drink or a candy bar, or do you give it to the homeless guy shivering or sweltering on the doorstep? Little things - and you never really think about them, do you?
But sometimes...well, everyone reaches a point where one of these either-or decisions affects their whole life, their existence...the very path they will walk down the next day. For some, this decision is which college to attend, whether to take this job or that, to live here or there.
My choice was between two men. Clichéd, I know, but it's true. One was my taxi ride home - a little bit of a let down, but sturdy, reliable. A squash player, tall, with clipped dark hair, golden skin, and heavily-lidded eyes. A lawyer in his late twenties, already making six figures a year with his father's firm. Handsome enough as he leaned out of his BMW in his Armani suit, his Gucci sunglasses covering what could be lovely eyes if they weren't so cold. Most green eyes are liquid - his were the color of the money that flowed through his veins, and as empty of any real feeling as the squash racquets he loved. His family was close to mine, and it was always assumed we might get together.
And my sundae: a poor, depressed writer. I met him when he was working as a street vendor, calling to people as they walked by. Tall as well, but not as heavily built - he was lean and always looked slightly hungry. Flaxen hair and warmy sky skin and eyes so blue I could nearly lose myself in them and feel I was flying through fields of cornflowers. He was older, in his thirties, but strong with tattooed arms and a soft, delicate baritone voice. His clothes were haphazard, and his accent somewhat pronounced, but there was something about him - something in the glint of his eyes, in the cleft of his chin - that drew the eye. Something special.
My family - the Bloomwood family, of New York - we were famous . My. My father was worth some several million dollars. He was an investor, a company owner, a shareholder - I was never entirely certain what he did - or what he didn't do - just that I never wanted for anything. I always had fashionable clothes, parties to attend with my parents and other upscale families, a pony when I was five, the finest education a girl could ask for. I attended Catholic school, a conservative university, and graduated. I went back home and, for all my fine learning, spent my days reading poetry and painting and sometimes playing the piano. I had a lovely voice, I had a fine hand for words, and I had an eye for colors, but my parents had taught me I was a lady, a princess. And the princess waited to be rescued, wooed, and married by her prince.
If only they knew.