perfectly imperfect

She wears her cat eye glasses like a crown of intellect, though she knows it’s just an indicator that her eyes are less than average. She will walk with her small pointy nose in the air and show her freckles off for the world to see. Freckles she used to be made fun of for. Freckles that pasty teens wishing to be on the covers of magazines no one reads now draw on themselves with pencils meant for the faces. 

Not the same as the over-sharpened pencils she draws with. Not the same at all.

And though her thin-lipped almost-smile won’t reveal much of her emotions, she will feel nervous, the sparks of unease quivering in her empty stomach. She will have wanted to eat, but sometimes the butterflies sit better with no toast to bump into.

The schedule will crinkle like the paper it will be in her hands, fragile and old and on the brink of falling apart. It will have been printed by a printer that is old and simultaneously new because it will have been bought at a garage sale like the best of items. The ink will be smudged, right at her name. A perfect imperfection, in her imperfect eyes. 

The audience will be ever so silent, ever so still. With the occasional cough, breath, or ring of a phone. The holy trinity of interruptions. Maybe, maybe, with the wail of a baby, cutting through as well. There will only be one baby in the crowd, and she will look at it, wondering if there was maybe a time where she wanted kids of her own.

There are only two ways she sees herself as special or different.

One

She writes and she draws and she sometimes paints. Her favorite color is green and she has four different shades in her drawer of mystery(mostly filled to the brim with art supplies and letters she never sent). Olive, fern, chartreuse, and that yellow-green that really just looks like yellow.

In the back of her room, she will keep her favorite paintings, the ones of trees, made with love, caffeine, and green paint.

She does it all with her left hand. 

Two

She loves color, of course, and while half of that love is fulfilled with the paints, the other half is filled with longing for more. She will wipe her fogged up glasses with the corner of her shirt and look through them again, searching the aisles of Target for more color.

Boxes and boxes of crayons, shelves and shelves filled with flowers, both real and fake, and the thing that will catch her eye will be close to the section where she gets her cough medicine. 

The tiny little fake pharmacy there. She forgets sometimes that dye and die don’t mean the same thing and when she finds a small cardboard box of blood-red dye, she, of course, will be intrigued. 

One small clump of her hair will be murdered one night, and now it will stand out against the pale white blonde.

Of course, the people watching will not notice these things about her first. They will not be there to watch her write or paint or draw, and the dead piece of hair may be covered by her hat. 

They will still see her as special though. 

There are certain things you notice first about someone when you see them like:

-Their eyes

-Their posture

-Their expression

And her green eyes obscured by thick lenses, matched with an almost-smile and a mostly straight back wouldn’t say much about her. So she will hope they will watch her carefully as she makes small notes on the sides of her papers, with her right hand set firmly on her hip.

The sun will be out that day, of course. The sun is always ‘out’, never ‘in’. She will remember when they were taught as children that the sun came up in the day and went down in the night, and they all blindly believed. 

Though she will wish she didn’t so firmly believe in the obvious or logical because it’s nice to be swayed by the magic that is all but fake, such as wishing stars and bad luck black cats.

Her pockets will be very, very full with:

Pennies

She’s too smart to believe the ‘good luck’ they bring, but she will have made a habit of bringing extremely loose change with her wherever she goes. She will have thirty-four cents in all, mixed with the penny she found on the ground, the ones she already will have had, and her prized dimes.

Gum

The smell of breath is a fragile thing, and by then she will have been filled with tangy memories of being told to brush her teeth. The flavor will be a mint, the type that makes your tongue burn but the smell of your breath ‘fresh’ as advertised. She will take as much precaution as she can, licking her wrist discreetly to triple check if she needs it or not.

Phone

Funnily enough, it will not be her own. It will be her sister's, Lilith. It will take better pictures, and she will know this. Lilith will have shoved it to her sister, hoping for a picture by picture recount of the event. She will not plan of using it, but will appreciate the thought.

Keys

The pockets of woman clothing rarely fit anything, and so she will have to push hard to get the two keys to fit into her pocket, and even then they will stab her in the thigh. One for the small car that is also Lilith’s, and the other for the small apartment(where she lives with Lilith).

She will stare favorably at the tree’s leaves swaying in the breeze. The breeze will also tickle her cheeks softly, and she will want to rub at them, but will resist the urge. She will know her pale skin will be reddening slightly, as it always does at the smallest wind or in any weather below seventy degrees Fahrenheit. 

In warmer weather, she does not tan, rather her disobedient skin likes to burn up and peel and take up permanent(really temporary in the summer) shades of red, almost matching how the one clump of her hair will soon look. 

There will be no speech written out, no guide. Only her heart and soul leading her to where she’s meant to go, only her mind faintly reminding her where to put her foot after foot down on the pathway, though her soul will want to venture into the beyond.

Maybe one day. 

Her brain will softly whisper to her the words she wants to say, the things she wants the people to know. 

Crystal blue tears will threaten to spill as she looks out at the people before her, at the tiny baby in the front row who will one day be part of the world’s future. She will want to whisper to the mother clasping tightly on the small creature’s waist to protect her, though she knows she will. 

She will in her head try to count the people there, but will grow dizzy at the first row, and she will know there will be countless others watching from their own little safe havens, with the cameras focusing right in on her almost-smiling face. 

There will be a thousand and one thoughts flitting around in her head including:

Shoes

Her heels will be coal, glossy black, and they will have been chosen by Lilith. They’ll be as tall as they are loud and she will wonder if, at one step away from the podium, she is destined to fall, tripping on nothing but air itself.

Cars

The keys of her sister’s Chevrolet Bolt will slowly be numbing into the tissue of her leg, and she will briefly dote on the fact that she never wants to own a car of her own, for multiple of her own reasons. She has an almost fear of driving, not large enough to call a phobia, and not large enough to prevent her from driving, but it’s there. And of course, there’s the pollution.

Eyes

As the people would no doubt be watching her with widening eyes as she will settle in her place to speak, her heel clicking finally coming to a stop and her own eyes stopping to scan over the large crowd one more time. She will feel her glasses squeezing in on her nose and wonder if, in an alternative universe, her eyes are not perfectly imperfect. 

And she will finally clear her throat of lumps, her mind of doubts, and her forehead of sweat before speaking words of truth and wisdom the people will have waited to hear.