06-13-2019, 01:15 AM
i've never cared for anyone so much
i was born with a bomb inside my gut
There is nothing unique about her.
Nothing coy. She is not the type to bat her lashes or tilt her head or whisper soft and sultry.
There is nothing spectacular about the drab color of her. Like mud, she thinks.
She is neither mad nor perfectly sane, she thinks.
If the universe had somehow worked out how to create a perfect equilibrium between her mother and her father, she is it. What a perfectly ordinary thing she is.
But he’s looking at her as if she has fully arrested his attention. Not simply with her impulsive query but with the matter of her existence.
Perhaps she has grown accustomed to being shirked. Maybe that is why heat pools in her cheeks and she has to look away, confronted quite suddenly by an answer she had not prepared for. Just as she suspected, there is nothing she can do about it. She cannot even force her mouth into a pointed frown and offer him her sympathy because it’s not worth anything to begin with.
There is not much that startles her anymore. So, when he lifts his head and she sees – without any uncertainty – that there is something about him quite different than her, she does not balk. Her attention is drawn rather promptly from his mouth to the vibrant color of the flower caught between his teeth. And what a lovely color it is.
It is not until he ducks his head and gestures for her to do the same that she feels the first splintering, unsteady legs of her uncertainty. She blinks once and then obliges. The flower settles, its stem catching in her forelock, so that when she lifts her head it shifts but does not fall. Being that she is so wholly unaccustomed to being the object of anyone’s attention, she does not think to worry that it might look comical, dangling between her eyes.
“My name is Lilian,” she says for no real reason in particular. Just because it felt nice to say it, for once.
