The Architect’s Daughter (our 100th post!!!!!!!)

She was the kind of girl who wouldn’t pick up the phone after seven rings because she wondered why she should bother anymore. Her nail polish was chipped and cracked and generally unkempt, and it was obvious to see from the bags under her eyes that she never slept. Not that she didn’t try. But the darkness was so slippery and her mind always so malleable, and her legs so long and her hair so dark. 

You understand, don’t you.

She would.

When she walked into the class in the morning her bag would drip from her arm and her sweater half-slip off her shoulder. Stumbling into the room pens and pencils would fly out of her fingernails and she was a walking hurricane with one sock high and one sock low and her lips a little too wide and her mascara leaking. But she’d struggle to her chair and release her baggage. 
     As if it was all only that easy. 
Huffing, yanking the straps of her bags over the back of her chair she'd pull out her hair, retracting into the curtain that she'd made behind the strands. Pulling out ink she would draw the world on her fingertips. And whenever the teacher tried to catch her off guard with a question

she’d always know the answer.

Funny, isn’t it?

Walking down the street is a running monologue. And everyone on the sidewalk was woven into her head and she fixed them in her stare; they were all she wanted to be, and all she hated, and all she loved, and all she dreaded, and all she feared. Laid about before her she saw it all behind her knock-off ray-bans the tint a little too dark so that sometimes she couldn’t actually see out of them, but it was okay because she did most of her seeing without her eyes.

How could that be?

You ask.

Pulling open the door she’d bound up stairs in two-step. “I wish I had that much energy, when I was young...” Ms. Peterson in apartment two would say and she’d smile and nod in her black jacket twirling left out of the old lady’s way. 
        twirling right just for fun.
On the subway sometimes she’d put in her earbuds but not play any music. She’d read the cheesy ads, and everyday look for lady liberty over the rips in her stockings and the tangles in her hair.

But you'd never look at her.

She’d always stare back.

 She thrived on empty space. An open room with brown paper rolled out across the floor. A thousand rolls. A hundred rolls. And a pencil in hand as she'd twirl around and she was her own compass and her protractor and she will protract you and spin around and around and around and around and

around.

Circling the answers and the wrongs and the suns in between her fingers. Amid the burns and scars and the scuffs, she’d circle the world.