Sincerely, Jennifer x

I began to wonder about her glasses,
hungry for a change of scenery,
wondering what my world looked like through the eyes of another,
wondering how my dreams would reflect in the lenses.

I think I fixated,
as I so often do,
because I was thinking back to an afternoon in September.

I get stuck there,
with no money in my pocket and no thoughts in my head,
down by the DLR station,
wondering what will become of me,
what I will become when I learn to live for myself instead of another,
but, I never learned.
I didn’t want to.
I didn’t have to.

There was no merit in it,
no gold and no rainbow,
no end and no beginning,
so I stayed, stuck there,
pulled back, every now and again by her glasses,
but always commuting between myself and that child at the station.

I’ve always liked girls in glasses,
ever since I was fourteen,
when I saw the girl in the computer lab,
self conscious and shy,
I wanted to wrap her in warm words,
hastily scribbled, sincere stanzas about how my heart raced, only for her.

We were just girls then,
children,
convinced that we were older, but never knowing better,
and so I’d let a little find her,
glued hands under cheap plastic tables,
phone calls where not a word was said.
These were my deafening screams of devotion.

I wandered, lonely,
but not as a cloud,
lonely, as a lover who must be muted,
glancing with great sadness at the rooftops and sighing “perhaps tomorrow”,
but tomorrow never came and it never could.

Now I look into the lenses of new glasses, and I feel the same words working their way through my soul and into my skin.
They won’t be stopped, and I wouldn’t want to stop them.
This is the passage of time.