For A Dancer

swifter winds

I go to seek a Great Perhaps.

rattling about,

making noise before I turn in. 

I watched a documentary (oh, yes, so very intellectual of me) about two Native American seniors in high school, deciding whether or not they would leave the reservation for college and for life. The camera showed dirt and dust, tiny bedrooms, uncertain dreams. 

I just wanted them to be okay.

The metallic member.

This is my wild twenty-something life: shoulders rolled forward as Flo and I go back and forth on the Google doc, figuring out what this fictitious chick stands to lose. You see, the better I am at ruining fictional lives, and showing how I’ve done so at the perfect pitch, the better the odds of getting noticed. 

I worry about reaching a point where the adventures trickle to the drips you hear at night when the room is just quiet enough. Maybe I’ve never been bold enough and should be dreaming in sand, not snow. I yearn for snow lately. Summer’s never been enough. 

Back to it, girl. 

Clicking on comforters

means that I’m gearing up for the decision I make every time it comes to things that will be semi-permanent: handbags, sheets, cell phone covers. 

One summer before returning to college, I stood in Wal-Mart with my mother for at least an hour, looking at bedding. Dark blue. Pink and green and white. Dark blue. Happy swirls.

In the end, I picked the one I’d suspected I would.

“I’m guessing your favorite color is pink,” said a friend of a friend on a cold Halloween.

“No.” Then I looked down. Pink fleece. Pink backpack. Pink phone. 

From those years on, I haven’t chosen the mature colors, the sophisticated ones, or even my favorite ones. I gravitate toward the bright and the bold. The giddy and dizzying. Because I imagine that those will be the colors I need on dark days.

And in a way, I guess I was.

It’s been so long since I felt like the crazy one. 

I coach a girl who furrows her eyebrows when you give her a correction that she doesn’t understand, or when you make a joke. “Okaaay,” she says slowly. She’s good for that — making you self-conscious.

But on the phone the other night, I felt like the girl of my past relationships, the one who ventured a truthful nugget and then spent the rest of the conversation backpedaling. No, no, that’s not what I meant at all. 

Though I might have meant it. A little. 

sing for me

I appreciate how quiet this space is.