How To Guide.
Remind me again how to trust a person. Send me a map with arrows and dance steps on it, or a dotted legend for treasure, or something with longitude and latitude written up the side so I can get an actual orientation. Show me the how-to guide that we all wrote when we were first in love: young and naive. Put a post it note on my frontal lobe, or send me a checklist of things to do in the mail.
Take out your crystal ball and tell me exactly when it will be, get out the palmistry book and find my heart line, shake the magic eight ball and we'll suddenly know for sure. Let's play rock paper scissors for the answer, or hop scotch, how about dominoes? Break out the Ouija board and we'll ask the dead, take a trip to a place of worship and we can ask a higher power, or multiple ones if polytheism suits you.
I'll take a walk a few blocks to the nearest bookstore and wander the self help (a)isle for awhile, see if anxiety or a definitive answer in book spines finds me first. If I turn on the radio or the television there's sure to be someone that will convince me of a ten step guide, five if I'm in a real hurry. In the grocery market next to the checkout counter, Cosmopolitan will tell me that I should get a new haircut, lose ten pounds, and shave all my body hair. Books about finding a man tell me to wear heels and bright lipstick. If I change enough, I am told, I will finally trust. Forget and forgive, therapy books say, accept the other for who they are, talk show hosts guide. When I look in the mirror, my gaze is met by a suspicious stare.
I walk alone on cool days surrounded by strangers leaning in close on the street or at a corner store-- I am not afraid, and yet, for some reason, when I bear myself completely to one I sometimes feel myself shrinking. Ready for the rejection, the dismissal that will surely come with time. Already feeling its cold hand. Tightening.
Take out your crystal ball and tell me exactly when it will be, get out the palmistry book and find my heart line, shake the magic eight ball and we'll suddenly know for sure. Let's play rock paper scissors for the answer, or hop scotch, how about dominoes? Break out the Ouija board and we'll ask the dead, take a trip to a place of worship and we can ask a higher power, or multiple ones if polytheism suits you.
I'll take a walk a few blocks to the nearest bookstore and wander the self help (a)isle for awhile, see if anxiety or a definitive answer in book spines finds me first. If I turn on the radio or the television there's sure to be someone that will convince me of a ten step guide, five if I'm in a real hurry. In the grocery market next to the checkout counter, Cosmopolitan will tell me that I should get a new haircut, lose ten pounds, and shave all my body hair. Books about finding a man tell me to wear heels and bright lipstick. If I change enough, I am told, I will finally trust. Forget and forgive, therapy books say, accept the other for who they are, talk show hosts guide. When I look in the mirror, my gaze is met by a suspicious stare.
I walk alone on cool days surrounded by strangers leaning in close on the street or at a corner store-- I am not afraid, and yet, for some reason, when I bear myself completely to one I sometimes feel myself shrinking. Ready for the rejection, the dismissal that will surely come with time. Already feeling its cold hand. Tightening.