My Girl
by Genevieve LynchPage 3 of 3
I shift the sheet. Liz doesn't notice. The bottom of the slip is tangled up around her waist (why did she even bother?) and I see before me a set of legs that look like mine̵chubby enough, nearly translucent, pitted with a scar on the side of the knee from falling when she pogo-sticked down her driveway as a kid. And they're so smooth. Scanning her legs, trying so hard to want them, to crave the smell of the space between her inner thigh and her sorry naked vagina, imagining it offered to me when she awakens in the punishing Saturday morning light, glossy and cold pink, grayish brown around the mouth, so hairless and so the opposite of what I want. I imagine its taste and I feel so much, and none of it is sex. She's a woman, was a girl with a scrape bad enough to need stitches after tumbling down the driveway, lost a tooth playing field hockey in college, buys her clothes at obvious, overpriced vintage resale shops. She's too real, too possible, and everything we have is too false.
I get out of bed, still in last night's clothing, change my shorts without changing my underwear, find sandals and leave. I walk East towards the Botanic Garden stop to once more ride that above ground train, to consider my next move and perhaps to meet my destiny once again somewhere over Franklin Avenue.
