Read Online This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange - Free Book Online Page B

sense of everything that is beautiful and true, like our palettes and our retinas it needs to be switched on—by storytelling, illuminations, ideals that remind us of what it means to be alive and how it feels to dream.
    We seek the big stories and examples instinctively; the question is what we are leaving to be found. Without a rich cultural serial to follow, we become vulnerable to the persuasion of extremes. Today we measure our worth against impossible beauty standards and the nebulous metrics of personal branding. We police public “role models,” as though it were preferable—or possible—for any one of us to see any other exactly as she is. As though a perfect example is the only one worth following. Or we worry about unrealistic expectations, the flawless body that gets more distant even as it crowds us further into a corner. Well-conceived ideals require space to take hold, but they leave space too, for the determination of some ultimate self, and for self-respect.
    My call, more general: we must find a way to continue dreaming of each other. If it seems simple, it should. If we could just rest our minds for a minute, it might even be easy. The more difficult it gets to clear the necessary space, the more necessary that space becomes. Our ideals will occupy some other theater, perhaps, as yet unimagined; embody some other truth, still to be conceived. It need not—it must not—be designed in the image of any one thing, past or future, heightened or hyperreal. It just has to be a dream, and it has to not be this.

 
    Have a Beautiful Corpse
    1
    At fifteen I knew I had a lot of living to do, especially if all went according to plan and I was dead by twenty-four.
    That kind of timeline doesn’t really allow for things like grade-ten English class, yet there I was every Tuesday and Thursday, chafing under the rule of a new recruit named Mrs. Klapstein. Looking back, I would put her around twenty-five, fresh out of teachers college. At the time she registered only as someone of teaching age, an indeterminate bracket that had nothing to do with me. Mrs. Klapstein didn’t see it that way; I suspect she had ideas about playing the pupil-friendly radical at a regimented Catholic school. It was 1990— Dead Poets and all that. This shook down in various ways for me during our semester together. She once stoked a class discussion about unreliable narration by wondering aloud whether I had the hots for Holden Caulfield. A few weeks later, after I busted some fresh moves to “Let Your Backbone Slide” for a school assembly, she casually noted my “very sexual presence onstage.” I waited for the right opportunity to retaliate.
    Several years earlier I had begun cultivating my completely unoriginal fixation on James Dean. As soon as I was old enough to make excursions to the used-book store in downtown London, Ontario, I culled every two-bit, secondhand Hollywood bio from the premises. I scoured the television listings for his films; I begged my dad to add East of Eden to that week’s rental pull. He was beautiful, of course, the thoroughbred combination of virile and vulnerable that drives the girls wild. Perhaps more important, Dean easily dominated a category I had been populating with candidates since I was a child: narratives of tragic greatness.
    It’s a taste I picked up honestly, being raised Catholic, but also in a family whose stories could be considered classics of the genre: my father’s mother, an English Ph.D., dead at thirty-four of tuberculosis; his older brother, a brilliant doctor, dead at thirty-six of a heart attack; his younger sister, an accomplished opera singer, dead at thirty-three of an autoimmune disorder; his luminous twin, a mother and social worker, would die in her mid-fifties of cancer.
    I was eventually confirmed under my deceased aunt’s name, but on the whole, enshrining the departed and transforming our sad stories into