In your arms, I seek forgiveness. My hands overlapped on the small of your back are a blindfold from what I’m begging to repent for. You’ll never know what I’ve done, why the white roses have been painted red. I wish I could seal it in a lunchbox time capsule and bury it all the way across the world. What I want is to trace every mountain ridge of your hand, to rub our fingerprints together, to read you the sloppy blueprint of our life together. I want, want, want to love you.
You know I can’t. I’m fuck-broke out of it, you already know that. I’ve got more dimes in my porcelain piggy bank than reasons to put up with you any longer. I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for years, been grasping at straws and needles and passed notes in AP Language and Composition class for so long. My nails are filed to a nib, already.
Let’s walk and talk. There’s a shiny red stop sign that I know you’d be interested in, at the end of the block. I like when you wear flip flops on our walks; the clap of them against wet concrete makes me feel like I have an adoring audience. I like the slight swing of your hands when you're ambling down with good thoughts rattling in your head; it’s so annoying that it tempts me to grab them just to keep them still. I like your small talk pity when you notice I’m upset over my latest issue with the world that comes faster than the newspaper; that hiss of your S’s are like soda cans popping open their effervescence. I like you. That should’ve been enough.
The other day, you were braiding your hair at lunch. I was trying to stab my red-and-white-striped straw into my bag of chocolate milk without it bursting, doing abstract calculations of force equals mass times acceleration, as if anything I ever learned in AP Physics would ever be applicable in my multivariable life. I’m lactose intolerant and I wasn’t going to drink it, but that’s not the point. You practice your braiding all the time and you’re still bad at it. You start off totally wrong—you can’t eyeball equal sections of hair for shit. You start over so many times you forget to take notes and have to borrow mine.
I offer to braid your hair as often as you tell me that you need to learn how to do it yourself, even when your shoulders are aching and your test scores are slipping. Somehow, braiding your own hair wasn’t in your elementary school recess girl’s-talk-under-the-shady-oak-trees curriculum. I swear, you’re more alien than the homeschooled kids that still take mundane selfies deep-fried in filters. You’re the type that opts out of sex education courses. I mean, so am I, but I do it so I can nap in study hall and you do it because your parents would ground you for knowing the existence of the word “cunt”. You don’t even come to the bathroom with me when I ask because you don’t wanna hear my pissing. News flash: all pissing sounds the same. It’s piss splashing into toilet water. I’ll say it—you’re kinda fake.
What I really want to say is that you’re a bitch, but then you’d unfollow me on Instagram and I only have 54 followers so that’ll be a blow to my imaginary popularity. Oh, and another thing, you never have tampons! Maybe if you took sex ed you’d know that tampons have nothing to do with virginity and virginity is a social construct. Jesus Christ, be an ally for once. If I’m a slut it’s because I get $10 in my Venmo every time I bruise my knees on beige tiled floors in a gray stall.
But anyway, I think I ran over your dog last week.