11-30-2015, 10:32 PM
marvel
of being intimate with brokenness
I can hear someone behind me, but I don’t turn to see who. This world is full of feet and faces and too many bodies pressed far too close with too little room left for me to remember how to breathe. I’m sure the feet will keep walking though, they always do, I’m sad and blue and unremarkable in every way and no one ever notices me. But I like it that way, I’m not sure I would know what to do with any attention, not sure if I would know how to shape my lips around words to string sentences together. I’m not sure I would know how to live, how to be alive, how to be just like everyone else.
But the feet stop and suddenly I have to learn.
For a long moment I keep my eyes locked on my own reflection, and it’s hard because I can feel the strange heat of her body next to mine, the gentle whoosh of breath in her chest. But I need this extra moment for myself, need to trace the lines of my dark face and the muddy depths of my plain brown eyes. I need to remind myself of what she’ll see when she looks at me.
But she doesn’t.
I don’t feel her eyes prying secrets from my skin.
I turn slowly, just my face, I don’t think I could’ve moved my feet if I tried, but whatever I was expecting it wasn’t the pale and pink girl standing before me. The weight of my brow furrows and I can feel sympathy prickling uninvited at the backs of my eyes before my shame wipes them clean. Instead I shift just a little so that I’m watching her reflection where it mingles with mine, watching the tatters of her bony wings held aloft and blurred by the ripples rolling across the waters flat surface.
And I’m hoping she didn’t see that flash of sympathy.
‘Adaline.’ She says and I’m struck by how even a name can feel fragile, like I might mangle it with the roughness of my unpracticed tongue. So I don’t repeat it, I vow never to try. “Marvel.” I say, swallowing with the effort of using muscles long since forgotten. My lips struggle a little, and my tongue feels like cotton in mouth, so it’s all I offer. I want to tell her that I’m not, though. Not a Marvel. But instead I turn back to our reflections, drawn to where her pale and pink blends with the mottled blue of my reflection, wondering why there are hummingbirds in my heart.
on the surfaces of who I am