one way to die for an entire night is

she wants to be loved by someone beautiful.

to open your window and breathe in the sweet evening smells, to climb a

she has dreamt up names and a face; a smile and laughter and sparkling
green eyes. she has watched, through a haze of fairy dust, mornings at
coffee bean together, sitting opposite him cupping mugs in their hands
and not saying anything

because in the mornings at seven, lost in each other’s company with the
synchrony of their movements playing a harmony and the drone of
grey-suited office workers as a background accompaniment, what would you
like are the only words they need to share.

because when he loves her that much, the fragile things that her English
teacher calls language don’t need to break and s h a t t e r on the
floor or on his back when he leaves in the morning without saying
goodbye. because words, she thinks, are unnecessary; when they are
in love it will be replaced by touches, and smiles, and brief caresses.

one day, she thinks as she sits by the lake stripping flowers of
their petals, one day this will happen. her legs are in the water,
flowing back and forth and back and forth with the easy rhythmic
motion of the current, swirling bits of sky around her toes. her
calves plunge into clouds, and if she reaches she can touch the sky
and lift it up in her hands, watch it streaming in silver ribbons
down her fingers.

but she won’t do that yet. first she will find this boy, she will
ask him to come with her to the lake, and they will sit beside each
other and stroke the sky with gentle fingers, hold hands as they
swim through lonely airplanes and the occasional flock of geese.
the cold will bite them, but she will be too busy diving into the
sky again and again and again to care.

for now she is going to wait, to sit in the autumn chill watching
crimson leaves shiver down from ragged trees. for now she is going
to stay here by the lake, as pretty as poetry, and wait for her boy
to walk past.

tree when the moon rises, and stare into a blanket of faraway lights

on Tuesday afternoons she sits curled in her windowsill and dedicates
poems to his hair, his eyes, his breath. she writes a paragraph for
the taste of him on her tongue: not sugar and not bitter, not sour
and not saltyliketears.

(on Wednesday evenings she wonders what beauty would taste
like crystallised on her lips.)

and in Literature she writes a story about a boy and a
girl who are like angels, who fall

in love
and out of love,
and then into
a deeper kind of understanding
that cannot be taken away
by hitting the ground

and her teacher tells her that it was an essay on King Lear and
not Romeo and Juliet, part 2. she stares at the wall while Mr
Turner drones on about the importance of understanding and being
understood, and she thinks that when she finds this beautiful
boy being understood will be so natural to them that they won’t
even have to format everything they say into

strict little
rigid lines

within clever introductions, neat body paragraphs, and apt conclusions.
when Mr Turner is finished she walks away and leaves the door open
behind her, smiles at her friend Nick who is waiting outside the office
with his haversack slung over his shoulder and his careful careful grin.
Nick takes her books and slides them into the crook of his arm, walks
next to her and asks how it went with Mr Turner.

she takes the books back from him, smiling laughing because he's been
her friend since forever and she doesn’t want to hurt him. but she
sees his eyes flicker and his grin slips. she frowns and rakes her
teeth over dry lips, because out of all the boys she’s met he is the
best and she doesn’t want to hurt him; he takes walks with her along
the beach and doesn’t ask his mates along, he listens to her and comes
over to dinner and helps her with calculus

and even more he isn't a boyfriend, he doesn't feel her up behind
the beach palm trees or in the middle of school hallways or at
parties. he isn't a boyfriend and so she doesn't need to break
up with him.

(because when her boyfriends touch her they are surrounded by the
crashing of the waves and the moans of the gulls, and even if she
closes her eyes and ignores the sound of their breath hissing out
through hungry teeth, she can't pretend that what they do is soft
yellowcandlelit and romantic.

because when she realises that their touch is selfish and rough and
fevered, she can't stay with them anymore.)

he asks the question again. she brushes his hand and says,
‘he doesn’t understand me,’ and maybe she means you don’t
understand me too.

for six hours, until the sun peeks across the horizon at

lately she’s been searching through alleyways and little side
streets for this beautiful boy. on Sunday mornings she fills
her Guess bag with lipstick and eyeshadow, then sits on the
subway painting her face red and blue and green, gives her
eyelashes wings. wandering through the churning city she peers
into dark little corners, stares through the windows of dingy
pubs squatting on road corners. the men inside watch her with
black hollow eyes and bristled smiles. she swallows and walks
away quickly.

by evening she’s sitting at the bus stop waiting for her boy to
walk past, watching the sun set and leaning her back against the
shelter. the fading light makes her hair glow and her glossy lips
sparkle; the boys who walk past talk louder and stare, but after
she glances at them she looks away because none of them have the
poet’s eyes, the lover’s hands and the dreamer’s smile she is
looking for.

she’s made mistakes before,
woken up to an empty bed
rumpled with last night’s creases
after falling for the wrong boy with dark-lashed brooding eyes.
she’s cried by the lake
for the boys who don’t want to be boyfriends,
for the lovers who forget to love --

the boys who stay are another matter; they kiss her and they
say they adore her, but when she stands there and lets them
hold her hand, lets them pull her to dinner with their parents,
she looks at them and can’t feel anything, can’t find the magic
and the high and the instant pinkcherryblossom rush of connection.

but now that she knows what she lacks, she’s going to find it
somehow. that’s why she keeps on looking every Sunday, that’s
why she sits at bus shelters scribbling lines (I love you like
the flower loves the bird, because I cannot survive without you
and our kisses taste like nectar─) on the backs of receipts and
the palms of her hands. when she gets home she fills notebooks
with her bus-stop musings, and when she sleeps she dreams of
the poems that he will write with his lips and his tongue and
his gentle hands.

on Monday she gets up and realises that she is getting by in
everything that she does: history literature calculus life.
on Monday she realises that she only really lives in her notebooks,
in the black scrawls that scratch across the page and scream
brilliant rainbow colours into her mind. on Monday she thinks,
I’m going to change this, I’m going to make this real.

on Monday, she thinks, I’m going to find this boy and I’m going
to make him fall in love with me.