I’m having a Madonna moment.
Sometimes you get yourself into those situations where you think “Only Madonna would understand how hilariously stupid this is and still be able to pull it off with a swagger.”
At least if you are a girl who grew up in the 80s, and thus is really no longer a girl but insists on calling yourself one anyway, just as any male creature who is a possible romantic interest in your life becomes “the boy” though you have refused since sometime in the early 2000’s to use the term “boyfriend.” (Nor, if truth be told, have you had a “boyfriend” since sometime in the early 2000’s. You’ve had lots of other things, including a fiancee, but no boyfriend. Which is, nakedly, a good thing.)
So, Madonna. Many times this week I’ve found myself singing this song, above, or the one below, both off “Ray of Light” which came out when I was a senior in high school and soundtracked a bunch of dumb experiences. I was in high school then, though, right, so it was OK?
Ha. We don’t get wiser as we grow up. We learn which screwups have consequences and then sometimes we go right on ahead and do them anyways.
Other times we do things that lots of people would tell us to regret and we march through them, grinning, with that swagger. Madonna taught us that.
I just read this, from Susannah Breslin, about getting married on the fourth date and then getting breast cancer (thanks Isabel) and it made me laugh a bit because my own stupid situations in love have been epic, but they’ve also been so cautious in their way. I always know where my escape door is.
(An ex-boyfriend of mine from a few years after these songs came out told me a story of his New Orleans apartment from well before we’d met, when a teenaged-or-barely-out-of-them him had a door in his bedroom that led to a little staircase and outdoors, and he in his ever-so-classy way jokingly referred to it as the “ho hatch”, as in, the girls could go straight out without having to speak to his roommates. He was being crass but I think I’ve designed my love life like that apartment.)
I mean, the real risk is deciding to stay, and whether you do that after four days or four years, it doesn’t change that any day now that person can break your heart.
Yes, I’m being fucking cryptic, Tumblr, because though I long ago stopped hiding my feelings from the world I do try to give their subjects a little bit of privacy.
So: Madonna. “Why do all the things I say sound like the stupid things I’ve said before?”
Probably because they are. And yet they are also new each time, a little bit different in each context, loaded with meaning and space and time and fucking breath, sometimes they come from your gut and sometimes from your head and sometimes from your heart.
So you shake your head and smile and feel good anyway and walk with a bit of a swagger, because Madonna taught us girls right.
