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Girls will be girls
Sometimes I laugh at myself in retrospect:
The way I carefully pick out my outfits, style my hair,
throw on the right amount of jewellery to perfect
that effortless look - in those moments, I never realise
that I’m doing it all for you.
I look in the mirror without seeing that I’m
imagining myself as you looking at me
(in retrospect, I realise that I am what John Berger meant
about women in Ways of Seeing).
When I offer the correct answer in class,
triumphantly eliciting a nod, a murmur of “excellent” from our teacher,
I revel in the shallow puddles of his admiration,
drown in the envy that pools on your face,
which I carefully pick out from the way
you purse your lips and pick at your nails - or at least,
which I have trained myself to see.
When you offer the correct answer in class
I feel the pit of my stomach widen. I cling
to your every word; sit in the hollows of your punctuation;
infatuated with your syntax; while I wait, expectant
in an apprehensive sort of way, for you to stutter;
make a mistake; overload your sentences with one too many
sophisticated words and accidentally displace any meaning,
because it’s only then
(when our classmates roll their eyes,
consider you overzealous)
that I win.
When we speak, looking
at each other and yet missing the other completely,
(seeing not each other but the paucities of ourselves)
I string together every word you say
and decipher it like a rebus, looking for
that hidden meaning, that undercurrent of jealousy,
which I will store behind my tongue
to taste in rationality
until our next conversation.
But these are things I would never admit to you.
Though the foundation of these games we play is,
undeniably,
the chasing of some chimerical victory over the other,
to admit that I am (as they say) jealous, is to admit
that I believe you to have something I don’t.
And I’ve grown so use to this dynamo we dance to,
that I wouldn’t be able to tell if
I was the only one still dancing.
But, you know. That’s the way it is.
I guess girls will be girls.
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