humansareprudes:

the same informercial has been playing for
40 minutes now and the
remote is on the coffee table but her head has been in my
lap for two hours,
sleeping for one so I
haven’t been able to take my hands
from her hair long enough to 
change the channel. So I will gladly
sit here learning about the powers of the
magic bullet because her hair
is softer than I could have ever imagined and she
is so much more herself right now. 

Today was
the first day I told her
that she’s beautiful and she
took that like the compliment was a broken elevator her
heart a string pulling up but her
head a string pulling down and the “close door” buttons
were jammed in. 
She said
“no one has ever
told me that before,” and it wasn’t 
a thank you just a 
reminder that no one had ever told 
the elevator wire girl that she
was beautiful. Not in the way her eyes looked before &
after she lined them in the mornings and
no one told her the paleness on the back of her neck
made her look like the breakable porcelain doll she saw herself as. 

When she told me that, I noticed she was
smoking her cigarette down to the filters again and texting the boys
with the printer paper skin and
broken mascara wand bones tied together 
with barbed wire and chain links. 
all those fallible things
all those girly things
roughly tied together with metals they thought
made them manly just like they thought
not taking no would make them strong they thought
it would build their bones from broken make up wands to bench press bars and
turn their skin from flammable paper to ceramic tiles those
boys thought hitting her made them men. 
Those boys were just boys and they thought 
telling her she was beautiful meant nothing because they never
needed her to say yes anyways and those boys
just wanted to be men but didn’t know how and telling her she was 
beautiful wasn’t the way but maybe
it was a good place to start. 

She
told me they were at war now, 
with another country, but I knew
she meant with themselves and she looked at me with her
blue highlighter eyes and asked
if I’d pass her the salt and I did,
numbly waiting for her to say more but she just 
stopped. 
She knew talking 
wouldn’t make what happened to her different and she knew 
talking about them wouldn’t make me any clearer for her and 
I knew talking
wouldn’t make her believe she was beautiful so
we didn’t talk for hours
until we wound up here: 
in front of the magic bullet infomercial with her head
in my lap my hands
in her hair and her whispering
“You’re beautiful too.”