29 June 2000 ~ The Mask...

Tonight, my mom decided to show off her artistic abilities by sculpting a mask of my face. For an hour and a half, I sat in a her chair with my eyes Vaselined shut and then caked over with plaster-stuff. My entire face except for my nostrils, mouth included, was covered in hardening white goop. I couldn't speak, blink, move, or even scratch.

At first, it was a very helpless feeling. Kind of scary. Especially when my mom smeared Vaseline all over my eyelids, lashes included. I felt so trapped. All I really wanted to do was freak out and start scraping the shit off my face and yelping, "GET ME OUT OF HERE!"

And then, slowly, I calmed myself down... My mom put on a CD; Chris Isaak, at my request, and I found myself in this state of serenity, almost unconsciousness, but not quite...

...But I still wanted out of that mask...

When it came off, all I could think of was the episode of Twin Peaks where Agent Cooper finds the mask of Caroline Earle's face lying in his bed. Caroline had been his lover; she'd been married to Agent Cooper's best friend, Windom Earle, but there had been some kind of an affair going on, and she ended up dead, and... oh, whatever... Agent Cooper finds the mask in his bed. I decided that I wanted to put MY mask in somebody's bed and see what they'd do...

I told this to my mom. She said she didn't remember much of the second season of Twin Peaks. She said the mask was beautiful. She was right.

There's a tiny smile on my face -- just a tiny one at the corners of my mouth. The jaw is just a little crooked, maybe; I was nervous about feeling so trapped. The face looks lighthearted and young -- and a little scared. There's an intense anticipation in the lines, and a broken heart in between the lines. The curves are soft and pretty, and textured on top with all these rough-n-ragged bandage-looking things.

I thought maybe it looked a lot like Caroline Earle's must have looked, although I don't remember what she was supposed to look like.

I realized today, under that mask, that I've stopped talking freely in this journal. My words are guarded, the feelings dealt with through music and quotes and pictures.

Why? Well... I'm afraid of hurting people. I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing, or saying the right thing the wrong way. Frankly, I'm also scared of the power of some of the things I could say; the intensity of the things I feel... It's just so much easier to put some vague song lyric in a journal entry than to actually say what's on my mind, and why. It's easier to spend the day scanning pictures than it is to discuss the guilt of the mistake I almost made recently, and why my mind was preoccupied into that state in the first place...

It's easier to let everybody wonder about that rigid almost-smile at the corners of my mouth, and the soft fear in my forehead.

Sometimes I wish I could unload everything right here and right now, but I don't think I'm ready. For now, I am a mask.

~Helena*

"Caroline called me Cooper. ...Her reaction to Windom is confused. She knows who he is, yet something seems to be holding her back." --Agent Dale B. Cooper, "My Life, My Tapes" (shortly before the death of Caroline Earle)