𝐦𝐨𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞

xx

there once was a girl, a product of daydreams and pubescent fantasies, who lived in the small wooden house on the hill at the end of the street. her bruised knees and leather gloves told tales of mischief, of a quiet, dangerous life that simply didn't match the facade that she presented to the world. her white satin dress and pin-up blonde hair gave the illusion of virginal perfection, a christian daydream of naivety and good morals. the kind of girl that crossed her legs, pursed her rosy lips and spoke only when spoken to.

but the neighbourhood boys were perhaps the only ones who wouldn't accept this image that had been created for her: this wooden girl, carved from a crucifix and treated as though she was as fragile as a peony's petal. they watched her, as they often did- through telescopes peeking behind closed curtains, in prolonged glances when retrieving the mail from their front lawns. they watched the closed windows of her house, the mahogany porch where she would sit and read and smoke. waiting for a glimpse. from across the street, she gave the boys a sly grin, so momentary they wondered if it happened at all, that matched their narrative of the girl's faux innocence.

they had imagined the details of her adolescent life as though she was a character in a coming of age story; they imagined the wilting bunches of wildflowers in the empty vodka bottles in her room, they imagined novels written by dead poets and feminists piled into a tower on a shelf, the locked box of journals, drug paraphernalia and other nick nacks she must have hid under her bed from her parents, and the fig coloured lipstick stains that printed her mirror.

and they weren't far off the mark, not at all- because she was predictable. they had seen a thousand different versions of girls like her in movies and novels, in the glossy- paged magazines filled with pornstars, and celebrities who smoked cigarettes for breakfast. whose wide, bluebell eyes probed un-answerable questions, and made boys like them long for the taste of a teenage girls lips.

she was the girl next door. the porcelain doll who couldn't be touched. the american daydream. alluring secrets threatened to spill from those wide eyes of hers, but never did. leaving those boys with nothing but their overanalyses.
she was their heaven- the replica of a teenage male's fantasy. it was as though she had been plucked from the lust-driven corners of those boys minds and moulded into the statue of an angel with a brass plaque at her feet that read "do not touch the artwork".

and all of those neighbourhood boys- who had no authority to do anything but observe the art, would spend their nights staring at the ceiling and imagining that she was by their side as they drifted to sleep. they crafted perfect little worlds, each only as unrealistic as the next, in which she was always the centre of. in their dreams she sat on windowsills in see though dresses and chain-smoked cigarettes, she cooked them meals that warmed the soft little centre of their empty hearts, and wordlessly agreed to satisfy any of their endless, selfish needs.

the most common attribute, the boys realised, as they discussed their fantasies in spare periods and weekends in their mothers basements-was that she almost never spoke. always was she was silently docile, meek. she never argued, never disagreed. only ever offered short-worded, trivial agreements when the boys left open ended questions to themselves in those dreams.

in their fantasies, she knew how they liked their coffee in the mornings, which side of the bed they preferred, their favourite band. she had heard every mundane detail of their lives, every thought they had spoken into existence. yet they knew nothing of her.

they hadn't listened. hadn't learned.
did she never speak? or was it that they boys were always too distracted by the soft skin of her thighs that bridged between her knee length socks and her skirt to hear what she had said.

all of the things that actually mattered to her, every word that could have been said that may have revealed something important about her life, was never breathed to life. and so she suffocated from the insufferable density of their male egos, of their eyes that only looked but never saw.