Weiland

She looks like Marylin Monroe headlining a rock band with her jean jacket, Zeppelin tee, and hauntingly good looks. She’s 20, a creative fiction undergrad. Into Poe, Plath, and all the morbid poetry one reads after one’s first great bought of agonizing bedridden hopelessness and self-doubt. Her mom thinks she wears too much black and she absolutely hates it when people compliment her big bushy blonde hair. She would chop it off but there’s a small vain part of herself that acquired a taste for attention. It’s her greatest internal struggle. The fact that she’s beautiful. She feels no one will ever take her seriously for her work or ideas because they’re too interested in surface-level interface or getting to know her physically instead of emotionally. Sure, attractiveness opens doors but she finds it only invites toxicity as most men just stick their dick through the crack and wave it at her. And the men who don’t are either intimidated or gay. All the women in power fear her because she’s sharp too. There’s nothing scarier than a beautiful 20-something with quick wit. It’s darkly ironic to her that a tiny thing with a stocky rescue for protection intimidates large swaths of the American public. How fragile we all are. Perhaps that’s why she eschews the expected and favors the metaphysical and paranormal. Spends her free time reading alone in wet cemeteries. Her meaty-looking dog by her side gnawing nodding fronds and chomping at bees.

That’s where I find her. She won’t even look up from her novel and it stings but draws me in. Her eyes scan the page with a pious openness. She’s serene with her back against a marble mausoleum. As I tiptoe past on the paved path I see for a second her eyes lift past the page. I smile. She smiles, returns to reading. I play through all the scenarios in which stopping to talk to her will go poorly: I don’t recognize her book; I want to pet her dog but its started into a low growl; not to mention she could be 17 (not that that ever stopped the French existentialists). I decide instead to walk home and write about her. That’s exactly what I do.