A still-innocent, sweet, polite magnetism pulls with all its force from within people who, inside, are not at all innocent, sweet or particularly polite when all is said and done. I refer to this as a person with a "sparkly" presence… I started using the term in high school when a friend dated a guy to whom we referred as "Sparkly" because he had a sweet, almost shy, understated demeanor, but he still exuded a strange confidence and always seemed subtly flirtatious (not with me specifically but in general). These factors contributed to this sparkly nature that burned bright and attracted people to the light.
Sparkle does fade. Like licking piles of gooey, cloyingly sweet frosting off a cupcake. The sparkly individual, like the sweet and formidable cupcake, lacks the fortitude to stand up to a trial by fire.
Today I had a "lightbulb-explodes-in-the-brain" moment (complete with all the glass shards lodging themselves in my brain post-explosion) upon realizing that someone who has lingered at the edge of my life for almost a year and a half embodies this same sparkly nature. All sheen and sparkle and nothing resembling substance beyond that (at least not for me). I of course recognized the emptiness long ago. I just never made the sparkly connection. I could only manage to think of the juxtaposition of sweet/polite versus this dirty bastard underneath.
Which leads me to the soundtrack du jour:
The lyrics say it all. Perfectly.
Despite all the false sweetness, there is something magnetic still and that makes me ache and want and not be able to think about anything else.
Today's obsession though was a different kind of obsession. Stuck in the office, I was completely obsessed with wanting to bake cupcakes. Probably because I could not. That is coming up next in my baking madness. Lemon cupcakes with lemon filling and meringue topping. Chocolate cupcakes with cream filling. And some as-yet-undecided type.