She’s just so strange.

Her nose defines her: twisted, skinny, asymmetrical, perverse. She’s perverse. She tries to flaunt her falsities but instead bares her innocence, and barely wipes it clean of inhibition. It trails behind her like toilet paper, stuck to her dirty shoes in her dirty mind. Her dirty face is covered in bad skin. Her skin is white like pale people on pale sheets in pale rooms, white like the empty papers she fills with empty mind. Her stomach, too, is empty. And flat. Like her chest. Flat like rats squeezing under doors.

She doesn’t shave her skinny little legs. She thinks nobody can tell while she’s draped in used clothes, in colors and patterns that have come to define her obnoxious brand of anti-sweatshop righteous indignation. She’s a goddamn hypocrite. She’s against violence unless it’s verbal, loud and obnoxious, when she’s ranting her beliefs to an apathetic crowd. She rages bloody, non-violent wars against apathy, but refuses to slice the hair off her goddamn legs. She thinks nobody notices when she wears the same pants or misses the train four fucking days in a row. But I do.

Her irresponsibility is breath-taking. She pays the least attention to what she cares about the most, and then re-pays all her attention in regret. Too late. She is reliable only in being late. Staying up late. Sleeping late. It’s like she likes to think she, in her 5-foot-two glory, can re-write the rhythms of the atomic clock in motion, can reverse the rotation of the globe in the sky.

It’s like she owns the sky. She likes to think it rains for her. I’ve watched her, face turned upward, outward from her emptiness, standing in the rain, as if it could mend her, fill up all her little white holes. She desperately wants to be mended, but not quite enough to do anything about it. She feels bad and she could bask in her misery forever, bash herself in the third person forever. But she likes to think she’s more than that. She likes to think she transcends her skin, even though she’s always slightly too aware of its existence, slightly too uncomfortable within its white walls, in white motion. She likes to think someday she’ll stop being irresponsible and empty and bad. So she writes pretty poems about it and takes pretty photos about everything else and they all come out pretty good. And then she’s not so bad.

But still so goddamn strange.

Labels: By Ana