Meet Tzipora

✿ This article was featured in Issue #3 of the Atlantic Bulletin

Unique among girls #

There are a lot of things Tzipora does differently to everybody else, and they start to make a lot more sense when you realise Tzipora either does not realise she is unusual, or does not care.

She has a lot of endearing characteristics that give great character to her mannerisms and physicality. She has a small overbite that makes her look a little froggy, and ritually pulls on her shirt and wipes her nose in anxious conversation. She is round-headed and cuts her hair herself. She talks in a low, expressive voice. She has been poorly socialised in childhood, and is afraid of casual conversation with people she does not know. She is keenly socially attuned and feels awkwardness painfully.

She wears the same clothes two or three days in a row. The outfits themselves are variations of the same thing, and her tastes don’t change. Everything hangs off her — she likes baggy, airy clothing, and upsizes to accomodate. She doesn’t like fashionable or voguish people, whom she regards as decadent and offensive. To Tzipora, taste is timeless and bound to the soul. In her case, this fact has held true — she has dressed the same as childhood, and very little else has changed about her in that time.

She is paranoid and conservative, good-natured and austere, with a moral outlook bound by her deepest anxieties and obsessions. She is deeply spiritual and material, fascinated with objects and their history. She has many collections of many things she’s found. She’ll likely die a Catholic, but has a confrontational relationship with God and no longer attends mass, as a declaration of humanism. She does not know if this has pissed Him off, but it’s working out so far. Maybe that’s why He made her a homosexual — to get back at her. He must have a good sense of humour, if that’s the case.

Tzipora may be intense and inward-facing, but she can also be disarmingly charming and self-deprecating. She has a good sense of humour. There are not many girls that can so easily reconcile the contradictions between the peculiar and the healthy, the eccentric and the friendly, and the violent and the domestic. That’s part of her character — an essence of being that radiates decency, good taste and a respect for the spirit of all things.