Ain't I Precious

My thoughts run deep and fast at three in the morning.  A time when the world outside is quiet and I can think without distraction.  Light from the kitchen pours down the hallway to a picture on the wall of me when I was eight.  Standing with a neighbor boy, I'm wearing cowboy boots, cut off jeans, bathing suit top and a baseball cap.

Not that I didn't like having girls as friends, I just had a hard time relating to all that which was soft and lady-like.  Now that I'm a woman, I still find it difficult.  I had a mare once that was sweet and affectionate one minute, only to turn and drive me through the fence the next.  That has been my experience with girlfriends.  Shopping malls and beauty salons are foreign territory for me.

While most women love books of romantic love, I always preferred the raw and the tragic.  One story I enjoyed was of a cowboy in Montana who got caught in a
blinding blizzard a couple miles from his home.  He lost his sense of direction and didn't
want to make the fatal mistake of pressing forward.  He slit open the abdomen of his horse and crawled inside to keep from freezing to death.  In the morning, when the storm had cleared, he found his way home only to slip on the ice and hit his head on the crude metal boot scraper bolted to the porch.  He bled out right there at his front door.  That's what he gets for leaving a bar at 2:00a.m. in foul weather.  He shouldn't have gone out drinking in the first place. 

My eyes now fall on a current picture of me taken nine months ago outside a nightclub.  A friend took it with a disposable camera, enlarged it and gave it to me for my birthday.  He said he like it because I look happily exhausted.  Funny, I don't remember feeling that way, or for that matter, what I felt at all.  I have more often been a friend to the opposite sex than a lover.  It's okay, I gave up the idea of being a sex symbol like Marilyn Monroe when I was fourteen, I knew it would not happen.  Although I clean up real pretty, have the manners of a debutante and the grace of an angel at times, I have never once been called precious by a man or anyone else.