Invisible Girl

Or, her confusion at and simultaneous desire to remain unnoticed.

I know a girl,

likes to blend in with

the wallpaper

always holding up the fourth wall

from falling-

never raises

her voice too loud,

never imagines anyone is watching.

She is agreeable, polite, demure.

She floats

along the sidewalks,

to and through her office,

a digital job in a

cardboard prison;

a ticking time clock

counting out her sentence.

As the sun tucks itself in

to the twilight sky

she finds herself wandering

through city parks, and

along the shorelines,

unassuming

and sure

she’s left no footprints,

no trace of a life to observe.

As the moon wakes up,

she sits

invisible

on a bus bench

returning to an address

where she pretends

she’s safe

nestled quietly in your heart.

But your heart,

like so many hearts,

is a chaotic place

where life made a mess

you haven’t bothered to clean.

So she stumbles,

aimless

over the broken glass and through

shattered frames;

hoping the foundation

has just enough

life left to support

a roof she can claim.

Still, she keeps clumsily

tripping

over her shoe strings,

falling down

on splintered wood and broken glass

to have you chastise her

for bleeding.

She’s become some thing-

unnoticed

yet unnerving

You can feel she’s there but

you’ll never know her name.

It's buried under the syllables in

a list of others' pain.

Sometimes, she thinks to clean,

tries to pick up the pieces,

and dust the webs from the corners,

patches the holes in the walls.

As she spackles and shines and scrubs,

trying to paint over all the pain,

she sings, bright and ephemeral,

honestly believes she can repair

the abandoned, broken things.

Her voice filled with longing,

The notes

soft

as a hidden spring flowing through the trees,

sharp

as crystal exploding against concrete,

as unnerving

and unexpected

as a broken church bell striking in intervals of three.

The lyrics to

another song you’ll never sing;

your wired jaw won’t open

to resonate

but the melody still buries itself under your teeth.

She knows

the heart she haunts

can never be home and

she knows

that no matter how much she cleans

you'll never appreciate the glimmer

of a once dirty thing.

She lives trapped like a memory

seen and unseen and

yet, like the contradiction

of her life, like the paradox of

continuing such a life-

nothing

stops her from trying

to repair the ruin

and have you ask her name.