It was always a personal quest of mine,
That
Ordinary
Feeling.
The very source of my life was
Rich and elegant
Filled with balls
And weddings
And smiling
And squeaky clean hand shakes and bathrooms
And spinning
And waving-
To people I don’t even know.
Feeling trapped in my own body-
A slave to my name.
That life would escape me,
After years of war
Within.
Without.
The first change-
On my 16th birthday, It came,
My first
Chance
To escape this life,
My life,
Was with her.
Salt-whipped red hair,
She smelled like the sea.
She was magical.
The closest to the sea I’d ever been were the water parks
Mother insisted I go to-the ones on the deck’s of fancy villas and cruise ships.
Fake water mingling with faker people.
I can still hear her laugh echoing…
She was smiling, and it was a smile as bracing as the sea wind,
Charming and enchanting and irresistible and
I almost tripped over my feet.
She was everything I needed-
Everything foreign and new and I could feel my new beginning.
My soul was in the midst of the renaissance,
And I was seeing rich colors and boisterous women
And I could feel nothing of my past-
Nothing of my parents or their friends or my friends or my friends’ friends-
No one to impress.
No one to see.
No one to act for.
Except for her.
We would spend hours and hours talking about her childhood
She would regale me with tales of her father’s botched attempts at building a tree house,
And how exactly the metric system works-
She was always smart, even when she was
Asleep
She was smart.
Perhaps that’s why she left.
She was smart-
She could see that I was winning the lottery-
And she was losing herself by staying with me.
Soon she would be the same as me-
She would be just as false and robotic
And she would have that metallic taste in her mouth like I did
And she would be as unscrupulous as my family and their friends and their bankers and I would just…
Let it happen.
She saw it,
She saw what I have been trying to escape for my whole life
And she did not want it.
She was brave.
She had follow through-
She left to survive
And she left to thrive.
I still remain, as cowardly as before
Only
Now
I wonder
All the bowing
And cow towing
And robotic dance steps
…Are they my choices alone?