Past Pop Seeping In

The egg cracks before her in a pan that might be too hot, sizzling into a million pieces that feel real and filmic all at once. She watches the clear turn white and the yolk round like the sun as she toasts the bread – debating whether she’ll dip the toast in the yolk or eat it like a sandwich. Yesterday’s sandwich was slightly below par, so dipping the toast will do today.

She takes the plate into her room. A click of the mouse and the music streams throughout the room. It’s the music of her adolescence – the music of that broke her fourteen year old heart, and once allowed her to dream.

She is the girl that watches you dance. She takes it all in one kiss at a time – she watches them laugh and she lets it pinch her skin. She loves their stories but she can’t deal with them at the same time. When they hold hands it’s her heart between their palms and the closer they get the harder it hurts.

People keep telling me she has a great sense of people. I don’t believe it. For I have never seen someone who cannot see her own reflection more than her.

At the end of the night she goes back to her room, having witnessed it all but having felt none of it for herself. She doesn’t see it as unfair that it hasn’t happened to her. She accepts it as fact – like some people are entitled and others just aren’t.

She lets the songs fill the air of her existence the same way they did when she was in middle school – waiting for the time when it could finally be her that the girls giggle at when a boy walks by the lunch table. She listens to the words here and now and she feels the sentiments that she did there and then and she doesn’t even realize that the fourteen year old girl isn’t sitting next to her, it’s her now.

It got her through then and it will get her through now. And she turns off the light and lies down in bed. The songs still fill her air and seep into her dreams and she dreams about a boy whom she herself has made untouchable. She has made him dance with the other girls, laugh with the other girls, tease with the other girls. She has written him off just like she assumes he has written her off.

But how I wish that she would look at him, the way she wishes he was looking at her.