There was a girl
A sad girl
With hair like untamed ebony
And eyes like tombstones and the universe
The type of girl that looks at you from under her untamed coal field
And smiles a beautiful thing
A ceramic smile
Soon to be stained by to much coffee
To much rot gut *****
The type of girl that sits naked in the dark
In a bathtub full of scalding water
The type of girl that fills subway cars full of poetry and lavender
Sitting bundled up in too many layers of clothing for this hot hot summer
The type of girl that works the nightshirt at a Walmart stocking shelves
And spends her breaks writing down story ideas in her journal
Stories about a funny girl
With clipped brown hair
One day while filling the shelves with organic caged beef
She remembers she left the journal out in the break room
And she rushes back to grab it
And stops dead in the doorway
Because someone is reading her words
And she begins to panic
And she begins to panic because the person who is reading the worlds she has spent months scrawling
is a normal boy
The type of boy who smiles awkwardly at the red eyes she wears like a bandage leaving the bathroom
A boy whose smile is clean and whose eyes are clear
Like a watering hole fed by mountain water in the early early spring
The type of boy that knows she’s a freak and she wants so
so desperately for him to tell her that
So that he stops flashing that sliver of a monochrome crescent moon
So that he stops giving her hope that she can be anything other than that sad sad girl writing stories in the break room
One night she is cutting boxes
Her sleeves rolled up, in one of those phasic moods where she doesn’t care who sees the angry red lines crossing her arms
A scarred ladder leading to unsteady hands
She puts a new blade in and jabs it into the clean side of a box
But the blade doesn’t glide through the smooth brown skin
But the blade gets caught in the gnarled fibers
But the blade is new and the feeling of gliding through the perfect side is taken from her
And she pulls her arms hard while thinking about the girl with chestnut hair
The girl who had shared a box of wine with her last night
She looks down on the floor and sees a growing pile of red wine
And she falls
And people are screaming
And she looks down and sees the blade sticking out of her wrist
And she’s speaking calmly that it was an accident, she didn’t mean it this time
Her manager is on the phone with the ambulance and the janitor is glaring in the doorway
Forever trying to figure out how to get blood stains out from the stockroom floor
And the last thing she sees in the cacophony of chaos is the normal boy
And the grimace of fear forever plastered on his face in her fading memory
She wakes up in the hospital where people visit her like a sandstorm
And doctors come and speak to their clipboards
One day the girl with chestnut hair comes
And no words are said
Just feelings screamed into the oblivion between them
And she knew that was the last time the funny girl would ever visit
Weeks pass, and one day the doctor comes in and says to his clipboard
Insurance ran out, so you are all better now
Even though she doesn’t feel better
It starts with a fifth of ***** after you come back to your empty two-person apartment
Then a handful of pills
Than more cigarettes than your lungs can handle
This slow self destruction culminates when she goes out on her balcony
And sees her neighbor smoking a cigarette next door to her
And he just smiles and says
It never gets easier kid
He flicks the end of his cigarette after taking a deep breath
And the girl with eyes like tombstones and the universe
Watched the cherry red spark fall
As smoke filled the stars in front of her
The man chuckled
But it’ll all be alright
And the girl that with hair blacker than a crow
Nodded into the starry sky