the girls

Smoke. It’s wafting off the incense I’ve burned in my room, doing a beautiful dance in the air, defying all standards of expectation and twisting through the air in unique patterns. So elegant. So uncaring. So bold. I could be enthralled in its gaze for hours on end. Alas, I cannot: I am late.

Walking through the halls, I come to a halt as I see my friends. I smell their perfume from a mile away, wafting off them not unlike the smell from the incense I caught. But their perfume holds a sweet smell of flowers and sun. Not mine. I stand next to my friends. I straighten up, pulling the sleeves down on my white shirt. I try to fit in with the routine that has been haunting me for so long. I laugh when I am supposed to, I make jokes that aren't really funny, but I make them anyway because everyone laughs.

I take a seat in my next class and see the girl with the golden blonde hair like the sun and the ocean blue eyes to match her siren like tongue and the pale milky white skin, sitting in front of me, splaying her hand atop the paper lying on her desk marked with red as everyone gravitates towards her like a magnet, a careless smile adorning her face.

I see the girl behind me. With the nice curly hair, the perfect black coils hanging down her back and the thoughtful black eyes and the freckles that stain her cheeks like stars and the deep brown skin. She's looking down at her neat paper with a triumphant look on her face. She pushes her nice curly hair from her eyes and meets someone else across the room and they run and grin with a rare solace found so little in others shining in them.

I sit alone in the middle of the room staring down at the paper in front of me.

In my chair I sit with the frizzy brown hair and the dirty brown eyes and the washed out mud colored skin. I’m looking down at my messy paper with a dull feeling of relief. I glance up at my faceless friends and try to laugh at a joke or say something loud and not mumble, something that will make me fit in and seem smart or seem like anything at all.

There is another girl sitting in the center of the room, with the brown hair cascading down her back like waves and the honey brown eyes and the long graceful hands that could wield finesse and the copper skin. She is staring down at her cluttered paper with vindication on her face. She grins at a joke and says something witty and unparalleled, effortlessly intelligent, as everyone laughs, a sense of respect bounding around the room. My vision seems to be blurring.

This girl is me. She is me and I am her. Maybe seen through the glass of the girl behind me or from the girl in front of me or the boy next to me or the teacher beside me with the chalk in their hand. I don’t know.

The three girls look everywhere, seeing everything but their face which they only see from the warped mirror in their hands. No matter how many times they blow on it, the hot air staining the glass like windows in the rain, pulling their soft sleeves over their hands, over their scarred wrists, and running it over the mirror, the smudges don’t seem to be clearing away.

As they raise the mirror to their face with one hand, the other hand vigorously writing on a page or fixing their hair or smearing lipstick on their lips they can’t help but see the warped image that is their face and look around enviously nowhere anywhere but the mirror; although the tears are filling their eyes so as they look around everything is blurry too. Nothing is clear now, in their perception. But clear is subjective, so perhaps with the misty mirror and the blurry vision everything is clear now. Or maybe not. Who knows? And they look in the mirror and stare at themselves with misery and feel bleak and wonder what everyone else is seeing. She is a jigsaw out of place, a girl frozen in the path of the eternal snake rushing to swallow her whole but she can't run because she is ensnared by her reflection in the beast's eyes.

She raises the mirror. She stares at the girls beside her. The tears have stopped pooling in her eyes, falling now, and her vision is clear, if just only for a moment. And I wonder for a minute, why am I looking in the mirror at all?

And the mirror comes hurtling down, hand cutting through the air, wrapped around the handle of the mirror, the reflection of the girls in their chairs flashing by in a rushing wave swiping through the glass oblivion wrapped around my fingers. The snake is still for a moment and the jigsaw is finally falling into place. And I could almost see the pieces of glass shattering on the floor, the view from my eyes being clear as day, the smudges on the mirror finally being cleared. It's almost reached the table now and I marvel at the pretty girls and the cages chaining them to their desks.

But the chain runs taut and my arm stops before the table and the snake starts charging and the jigsaw stops.

I The girl sits at her desk and her pen stops writing just for a second and her neurons fire and her arm moves up, the squishy pink flesh rubbing against the cool silver handle of the blurry mirror and staring at her reflection.

Confusion fills the reflecting abyss because the mirror is different because now I she can see honey brown eyes, like a sleeve had finally cleared some of the mist. Only a little though.

There are three girls sitting in a classroom. They don’t know each other besides a few envious glances and small words of acknowledgement. What they do know is the crushing weight of perfection and expectation and longing and loneliness sitting on their shoulders, waiting to be heard or seen by anyone, anyone at all.