BigSleep666

“Short Girl Army”

You are a girl.

All your life,
you struggle your way into high heels, boots, and platforms,
learning to walk gracefully,
elevating your stature to your personality.
You say you deserve to be tall.
“Amazonian.
Seven feet tall.
No!
Ten feet tall.
And bullet proof.”

You will grasp at and smile through and ignore for paternal approval
and sometimes you’ll get it
and eventually you’ll learn to readjust your expectations and settle for just sometimes.

You only take leaps when you’re sure no one is there to catch you.
You will jump off cliffs and knock out teeth
(occasionally they’ll be your own).

You never back down from a fight.
There are times when you wish you would,
but you’ll be wrong.

And you will brag about your scars,
declaring them a topographical map to your history and
because you say, “We’re all a little ugly.”
And you are always so very beautiful.

At differing points in your life,
a day without skinned knees or
moistened lips will be a wasted day, indeed.

And you’ll go to college and you’ll kiss a Hell of a lot of boys,
and it’ll be awesome,
and you’ll kiss a few girls, and
that’ll be pretty awesome, too.

You’ll wind up with some people and think, “I am so lucky.”
You won’t wind up with others and think “They are so wrong!”
You’ll apologize for settling, countering your friends’ cries of “He’s so lame!” with “He’s safe.”
You’ll convince yourself you’ve found “the one.”
Eventually you’ll stop telling yourself that, and you’ll surrender to indecision.
At another time, after one too many cell phone messages, missed dates, late dinners, stifled sobs, accepted lies, swallowed pride, and bitten tongues, you’ll move on.
You’ll meet yourself and fall in love.

You’ll get crushes on people you really shouldn’t, and that’s the only reason why you do.
You’ll go blonde, but it won’t suit you.
You’ll get tattoos you really should regret.
Sometimes you will plant words to blossom in secret gardens and
sometimes you will douse people with words mixed in chemical baths and
all too often, you’ll find yourself shoving one of your platform shoes into your mouth with a careless word.
You’ll get good at apologizing.

You’ll have sex you wish you didn’t.

You’ll go through periods where you watch a lot of porn and you tell people you like it, but you don’t.
And you’ll stop.
You’ll go through periods where you drink a lot,
but you learn to settle down.
You’ll never stop.
You’ll go through periods where you preface the word “boy” with the phrase “every God damned,”
but you’ll eventually stop,
though it’ll always be hilarious.

And you will produce magnificent failures of cringing embarrassment amidst
a continuous series of small glories and
you will always try to be kind and that will be your greatest accomplishment.
You are the recipient of innumerable 2:00 AM phone calls.

And every dawn that breaks will never be good enough for you
and you will want to smash them all with sledgehammers
and carve your name into the sky with jagged invective
and raise fresh green continents from the ocean floor with the seismic waves beneath your chest
and only then will you finally learn to laugh barefoot on hot asphalt.

And somewhere,
somewhere there is a six-year old girl jumping out of a tree into a patch of thorns and
somewhere there is a nine-year old boy trying on a pair of his mother’s pumps and
somewhere there is a fifteen-year old girl cursing out her mother for her short legacy
and if they’re lucky,
they’ll all grow up to be just like you.