FOUND POLAROIDS — JANUARY 20, 2025

I could never be that girl. So I choose to scatter my glitter out the window, set my bras ablaze, and move to Seattle to study philosophy. My love understands. He says long distance relationships work, sometimes. He knows a friend who sends poems across the country to his girl, and his girl sends him voice messages in the middle of the night. We could be like that. His thumb caresses the palm of my hand.

“I’ll miss you”, I tell him, and I mean it.

This body I have been packaged into betrayed me. The head of a cherub atop a soft torso; cigarettes look funny between stubby fingers and vanishing nails; breasts collide when I walk across a room. This is not the body of a goddess–someone who gets coffee for free, captures the regard of men, women, and children alike, and sends the first unaltered iteration of her voice messages.