girl over girl

I will not let my sadness turn to anger. I will not let my sadness turn to anger,

She writes this over and over again with a pencil on a piece of paper in a notebook she runs her supple fingers over. She does not let her sadness turn to anger. Instead she stews in it, swimming laps for a bit. Doing backstroke.

She’s swimming on her back and looking at the blank white ceiling she’s thinking about all the times she’s been swimming in that space before. How the water feels as it ripples across her soft skin. Her arms reach up straight and stretch far behind her head before they cut through the surface.

Yeah she’s thinking about all the time she’s spent swimming, not even just in that pool: downstream, lake, pond. How the water plants feel like cooked mushrooms in her bowl of soup.

She’s sitting at the table and her feet are dangling and she’s looking down into her bowl. She’s being spoken to. Look at me when I’m talking to you.

She’s on the phone in the bathroom begging to come home. She wipes her eyes and tries to have for once a conversation free from an idea of the past.

She looks down at her shoes and her head hangs there for a while as she thinks about changing those shoes and taking off her frilly coat and un-clipping the keychain, un-pinning the bow, un-tying the charms from her bag.

From her bag of snacks she crunches on a cheez-it and then she slips on one of the drain-grate-things and she knows this is how she is supposed to feel.

On the floor, in the wet.

She can’t help but cry out some awful little squeak when her arms hit the metal. She turns over onto all fours: knees dig into the grooves. She moves the hair from her eyes when she stands up and turns back down the street.

Let her be cute, sweet.

She cries more when she trips over the pant leg of her jeans. And it’s all caught under her heel.

She does a flip-turn and kicks her two feet hard against the concrete as she swims forward now, on her belly.

She has to swim on her back, sometimes, so she can breathe in deep through her nose and close her eyes.

Now she pushing out the front glass doors and, sure she bite that muthafucka head clean off like a cookie in four bites.

150226