constructing.an.identity.

she only likes crickets because they are exotic,
because of their noise and not the small energy beating from creeping limbs, jagged legs, a phobia of wings struggling on skin.
she looks around with a telescope and can't find her reading glasses.
she puts coconut oil in her hair, music into her ears, corporations on her shoulders, aspirations under an interrogation light.
she touches and retouches and erases,
frantic artist and decadent photographer.
she pretends to wash her hands, brush for sixty seconds, play video games,
she'll pretend like the backseat didn't break her heart like a shot goose.
she contradicts herself.
she gets lost in the mountains every time;
she absorbs their self-importance and wants to mention how the fog made it impossible to separate rock, snow, and sky.
she loved them first, then the stuff of museums, then the orchestra of color, then whittled down every last bit into a single gold sliver that was
him.
she owes the trajectory of her soul to a boy who collects her insecurities like butterflies in a net.
she is afraid of everything she loves.
she will stare for hours at the eyes, and the milky flesh, at the heart, at the centerpiece of her uncertainty, at the hooded sunrise bursting from every edge.
she shocks herself to awareness and blows fires to life.
she walks an unlit road.
she might be beautiful.