There are two types of girls,
Everyone is either one or the other,
No exceptions.
Sitting on the carpeted floors
Of childhood bedrooms
Hair pigtail braided
On either side of flushed cheeks,
Some dreamt of being in love,
The rest of heartbreak.
I was the latter.
No sadness or yearing,
I had simply learned an appreciation for realism
A lesson taught by my father
Sitting at the kitchen table,
Gin and tonic sweating a ring
Onto the perfectly veined marble slab.
I guess I always just knew maintaining
A love-of-my-life
Wasn’t in the cards
For me.
He loves me?
He loves me not.
My first boyfriend told me once
That I taste of pancakes
And smoke.
Now the sky is blue
And so am I.
Life seems to be a contest
Of who can care less.
Despite my best efforts
At sculpting a poker face of alexithymia
And blowing luck onto a six-sided die,
I’ve never had much of a winner’s mentality.
A sore loser at best,
I still can’t play Monopoly.
Always preferring the game,
Victory is rarely my priority.
I wonder if one day
I’ll read my spiral-bound diaries,
And my poorly constructed poems,
And the snippets of short stories
That I never did get to
And laugh.
Maybe I’ll just smile-
The way my mother does
When she hears a Janis Joplin song.
(No teeth. Eyes soft.)
I do sometimes cry
Over the nostalgia I feel
For a life
I never lived.
But also the betrayal I hold
For the life
I do live.
I don’t know what any of this says about me.
But it’s all true,
Unless, of course, it's not.
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