mistaken identity

Ethereal blonde wisps frame her angel face. She looks up, filtering her fake surpise through wide eyed naïveté. You smile and her eyes shift from your gaze. You haven’t seen her in weeks and still she can’t trust you enough to look in your eyes since you left. I was never really there, you argue silently, and she half smiles like she can hear you. You know what she’s thinking and you don’t want to be reminded of her, not the way she laughed nor the way she looked curled up in your crumpled sheets fast asleep in the late morning sunlight. You smile again, forcing the memory out of your head, and then you’re both acting like you’re BFF that never talk, or two people that haven’t met. You’re about to drown in the agony of the moment when she disappears inside the club. You forgot she always smelled like honeysuckle.

The night ends on a quiet note and you stop off at the bar on the corner to grab a beer before heading home. You can’t stop thinking about those fragile shoulders, the tiny midriff encircled by blue fabric, the bony hips dancing in a gauzy, floor sweeping skirt. Her face is all too clear in your mind and you approach the memory tentatively, afraid of what it might do to your already wrecked mind and limbs exhausted with self restraint.

Another beer and you’re gone, back, reliving the first night you meet her. She’s dressed in black, all porcelain skin and red lips and that wispy blonde hair that floats down her back. She tastes like cotton candy mixed with THC and her eyes dance like the twinkling lights that dot the Hollywood hills at night. Tonight she’s laughing and full of love, not the painful kind but the friendly warm kind that you find in a stranger’s eyes on the subway. She never knows what’s going on, but she gets up every day and tries to make sense of the buildings and sky and people. Red lips, dewy skin.

10 drunken text messages later and you never want to see her again. She’s not there, she’s everywhere. She’s the girl who left you for the TV star, times a hundred. She’s silent, content to play any role you create for her, alive in your bed but waiting conspicuously for you to make the next move. You wonder if she’s like this with all the guys she meets and that weakens the moment considerably.

If only you knew. We fall in love daily and get our hearts stomped on, but we get up and keep dancing on tables, downing peach vodka and kicking up our platform heels. We rock the miniskirts so you know what you’re missing and we never stop flirting to remind you of what you almost had. You are always surprised at how easily we move in and out of your life. You drop the act for a second, in a moment of vulnerability, but when we respond you’re gone. And we always move on, smiling softly to mask the empty pain of waking up alone.