The Girl I Become on Park Avenue
She wakes with the roosters and meets them at the farmer’s market.
Her hips and her legs swing to “Carnival” and “Cracked Actor” and “Can I Kick It?”
(Yes, she can;)
She walks everywhere, everywhere, doesn’t even use the train if she can help it— not that it’d make a difference, her lower half’s made of the same kind of steel;
(But in the evening it emerges from its tunnel of trees, bellows past like some crepuscular beast, and she watches it with reverence— takes her hat off if she’s wearing one, takes a video if she’s not— you’d think this was a once-in-a-lifetime migration.)
She lets herself in,
Not to drink or eat or buy or stay, just to look—
—though she could taste the gelato forever. (“No, dulce de leche doesn’t taste enough like caramel— let me try the Snickers one instead— that one doesn’t do it either— what is tiramisu, anyway?— oh, that’s far too much like coffee, I need the mango sorbet as a palate cleanser— and does the lavender honey taste more like honey or more like lavender?— last one, I promise,” and it is never her last one, and now the line is a mile long.)
She takes a backseat in her own major motion picture—
Turns out you can see the world a lot better,
When you look up from your navel,
And so she is in love—
With the silhouette in the train window,
With the lady behind the deli counter,
With the hip artisan couple’s dog,
With her classmates flocking at the crosswalk, even if she pretends she doesn’t see them,
With clothes,
And curiosities, and fountains, and stained glass,
And the blond squirrel she didn’t know was possible,
And the color green,
And buskers, all of them—
But what she loves best of all
Is TIME, when she has it,
Time to waste on being a part of the world.
⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅