In the real world, I’m nimble and quick
In my dreams, she, the girl she’d she met long before she met me, and some cruel small man are making me run the lengths of the trails that ran behind our junior high school.
Years ago, when we got far enough for the coach to not notice, we’d stop running, throw our shirts over the fence, and we’d walk in only bras, to make the heat slightly more bearable.
I remember a few of the conversations we had; I remember her imagining how my life would play out.
I remember one in particular, she told me how she imagined I’d lose my virginity, and it wasn’t perverse or sexual at all, because nothing was yet, being without shirts and speaking crudely meant nothing.
All of it felt so foreign, a year later, a girl in our grade had her first kiss, and we thought it was the strangest thing in the world.
When I had mine, a year after that, I didn’t like it very much, everything has always been dreamlike for me, like I’ve been floating all my life.
Kissing someone, feeling the firmness of their body against mine, was terrible.
I wished to go elsewhere agin, somewhere where everything is intangible and nothing is concrete.
I wished to go somewhere where those trails never ended, where sex doesn’t exist and girls never become women.
In my dream, I can’t run as fast as her and the other girl, which makes no sense at all, because in the real world, I’m nimble and quick.
During cheer practice, I outpace the other girls easily, it’s the only thing I’m good at.
I can’t dance or cheer well, I was given a critique once that my legs were too long and my arms too thin, I’m too willowy, too lanky.
I imagine my long limbs slipping through the cracks in the gym floor.
Alice through the rabbit hole.
I imagine nobody notices when I fall, and maybe I’d end up wherever I end up would look an awful lot like those trails, winding, with the hum of the interstate overlapping with the sound of shrill prepubescent voices.
Maybe I’d be back in my dream, still being outpaced by her, and the girl I never quite liked, and that small, mean little man.
I can’t accept it, can’t accept that the loss of virginity is not some foreign unknowable concept, surrounded by hushed murmurs of blood and pain that lasts days, I can’t accept that I am never going to go back there.
I can’t accept that I am going to love her and miss her forever, but none of it matters, because at our age, we are supposed to have boyfriends that we love more than our best friends.
I can’t accept what I see in the mirror, though that critique was right, and I am all limbs and often bones, I still see a woman’s body, not a girls, with breasts and hips that go far past the indent of my waist.
I used to starve myself until it all went away.
I stopped bleeding too, my body was a girls again.
But then I got so sad, and I was so tired, and I didn’t laugh, only cried, and she didn’t want me anymore.
I never got her back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/fPNjWymLBe
https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/xxjzI1B4M4