We'll Call That the One

It boils down to not knowing what's good for me. Even as a kid, I would beg my mother for the Kid Cuisine, and she would tell me I never finished them, and I said that this time would be different. But it never was. The chicken was always too rubbery and the brownie always too small. Half would get chucked in the bin and I'd still be hungry. Next week, repeat.

But my mother, she isn't here now to help me see the error of my ways. Even if I could usually win her over. I don't have that voice of reason. I have plenty of voices and they all tell me completely silly things. It takes most of my energy just to get up on time.

So I see you and I start to think thoughts. I get taken back to a time when I first had those thoughts, the time they were cemented, these thoughts I've only ever revisited to relive and never to review. You, with your backpack and your ponytail, your oversized sweater hiding your high-waisted shorts. Your dirty Converse just like mine were and your dark, dark sunglasses. You are the girl I always wanted, the one I could never get. But if I'd spent half the time I spent building you up and put it on myself then I'd realize how much a fool I was. But I didn't. Repeat.

There is a time and place where you could have made me happy. Where the jokes and the perceived problems and the endless list of your friends' names would, if not have purpose, make some sort of relatable sense. But as I sit across this table I am overcome with the urge to pull it off its bolted down legs and heave it through the glass, if only for a different kind of sound.

It was always the idea of you, kid. It was a fairy tale I told myself as I drifted off to sleep, a carrot dangling always in front of my daydream. But now I've got it in my mouth and I don't like the crunch. What's the cutoff here, the threshold? You think about something and want it for so long, you eventually cross a line where if you got it you would never be anything other than disappointed. That's why horror movies, the most effective ones, they don't show you everything. They let your mind wander. They know that deep in there are things more horrible than they could ever put on screen.