My Lost Girl

For the lost girls

I'm pressing hard against your jeans
Your tongue in my mouth
Trying to keep the words from coming out

~"Lover I Don't Have To Love" by Bright Eyes

She twists desperately, almost as though she were caged, an animal fighting for her freedom. She slams her tongue between his lips aggressively, deliberately, placing his hands on her waist, urging him to slide them lower. She kisses him harshly, painfully, and if he would bother to look he would see that tears sparkle in the corners of her eyes. He is surprised, perplexed by the strength of her reaction. He tries to soften the kiss, tries to speak. She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to hear him, slips her hands down to his belt buckle and unfastens it, barely registering the clang as it falls to the floor. She curves her body over his, wild and impatient and yearning.

She closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to think of him. She lives in her mind, the fantasy slipping over her eyes so that she sees him, imagines his hands tousling her hair, dipping, dancing across her skin. Like water sluicing across, so shocking and alive. She had looked up at him, her heart in her eyes, and he had looked back lazily, smiling, eyes fringed with such black lashes. She had kissed him softly, allowed him to touch her, love her, had fallen completely into him. “I’m yours,” she had breathed, and his lips looked so soft and she had thought it would last forever…

She bucks wildly, riding this man until he lies limp and exhausted beneath her. She pushes herself off of him with a gesture of disgust. Her lips curl up into a kind of sarcastic smile; she is viewing the aftermath of her latest exploit, her self-loathing and hatred welling up within her. The tears threaten to spill over so she gathers her clothes, puts them back on, and makes for the door.

“Where are you going?” he asks her.

“Away,” she says, shutting the door behind her.

~

I can’t live like this, she thinks to herself, breathing harshly as she paces up and down on the cold platform, waiting for the subway. I can’t. The darkness tears at her skin, eats her up from the inside out. She looks at her hands, at the fingerless gloves she wears and laughs, a burst of short, staccato gunfire exploding from within her chest. It’s almost as though she will break apart. Her heart is beating erratically, too quickly and then slowing to a murmur. She cannot decide what to do with herself. Waiting for the 1 train, pacing up and down the platform on 125th, she freezes in the cold.

She closes her eyes. The feel of his skin, the touch of his gaze; it’s still enough to make her skin hot. She shudders, remembering how he would stroke the back of her neck, trembles as though she were a colt in the moonlight, all lathered into a sweat. She pants, breathes; she can’t stand to think of what she does. She flirts with everyone, gives her body to anyone who will have her. It’s not that she is a slut. It’s that she wants him back. It’s not even him. He is unimportant in the grand scheme of things, something that she is aware of somewhere within her mind. She wants herself back, the sense of self she had when she was with him. She wants to feel as though she could conquer the world again, to know what it’s like to have someone believe in her. She wants to feel loved.

But she knows she doesn’t deserve it. And that’s why she tries to make the fairest trade possible, giving her body to those who want it. I’ll give you my body, she silently bargains; please give me your love. She does not dare voice the words out loud. To admit them would be to admit how pathetic she is, how fragile and how close to breaking. Instead she goes out with her friends, she parties, she drinks and she tries to drown herself in an emotion that will not be given to her. She knows, deep within herself, that she is unlovable.

But he had loved her once, and he had touched her once. She still didn’t understand why he had gone away and she didn’t know how to cope with it. He had made her think that she could escape it, the curse she felt had been laid upon her, but then he had turned out to be just like the rest of them. He had also left. She should have known. They always left, disappearing into the horizon of other dreams and girls and parties, while she remained behind.

Not alone, however. She had men for the taking, plenty of them, men who came up to her at parties and whom she danced for, slipping sensuously into the seat beside them, running her nails across their shoulders. She felt them shiver when she touched them, saw them startle and thrilled to the sense of power that gave her. But beneath it all, in a colder place, she knew that it was not power at all. Instead, it was a kind of surrendering, a bargain she was making with herself and with her soul which only succeeded in making her feel more and more alone, isolated within a body that had been touched by so many.

Her body felt used. She felt old, weary, her soul splintered into pieces. All she longed for was love, and yet nobody could offer it to her. How do I prove that I deserve it? she wondered. What do I do? And so she would do sexual favors for others, extend herself, fulfill their every fantasy, and all she wanted in return was for someone to love her as he had and prove him wrong.

She’s forever searching, my lost girl, breaking herself into silver shards and forgotten pieces. She dissolves into nothingness, a poetic white dust that skims her body and outlines it in fog-shined clouds of smoke, but what’s left is as insubstantial and impossible as the rain on the pavement; her shadow, the outline of a person in place of the human that once was.