Not sure what I want to write about today but just thinking about the number 14 makes me cringe. Reminds me of those days in 9th grade when I was the most awkward, needy, anxious dweeb, doing everything in my power to *act* like I knew what I was doing, like I was cool and had it all together, when anyone could see that I was the awkward, needy, anxious dweeb I hated to be.
Fourteen
and wandering the grounds of the American School
under the diesel sky of a blatting Avenida Observatorio --
short, awkward, silly, baby-faced, a thousand worlds
swirling my mind, a hundred thousand plots sifting
pubscent blood, reality as industrial and hopeless
as the neighborhood outside these locked gates
dying to be liked, valuable, beautiful, sexy, source
of admiring smiles -- not doughy yearning wrapped
in ghostly skin, unfinished, stabbed to the heart daily
by mean girls and ignorant boys, socially tragic,
"too smart," neurotic, shrill, and slightly evil, drifting
in fictionland, plucky Cinderella dreaming her in-
evitable discovery
