Choose Her Or Choose Me

Choose her.

Find her in the escapism of a night club or bar. Examine her, decide that her beauty is pleasant enough for interaction. Feed her your cliches, let her fall for them because she cannot catch the predictability of such phrases. Take her hand, dance with her. Fill your emptiness momentarily with the aura of her body. Whisper sweet nothings in her ears, anticipate requited laughter. Kiss her over glossed lips, taste her artificial colors. Get her number for a future date, or maybe take her home. Manifest those whispered promises, fuck her.

Let the days pass, take her to dinner. Talk the futile trivialities of life, slow-dance to the beat of small talk. Give her compliments, listen to her ramble and gossip. Distract yourself with the pleasant canvas that is her face and her body. Decide that the compromise will suffice.

Let the weeks morph into months, become a union of sort. Move in, sign a lease for a rectangular prism. Fight over the irrelevant subjects of furniture and decorum. Let her win because it’s easier. Because she is easier. Life with her is a safe known road. Have some babies, give them generalized names and fill those albums with the suburban story. Go on with life in passive existence, die knowing no emotions were neither felt, nor lost. Choose her, take solace in the vacancy of her existence and the austere reality that she encompasses.

Or choose me.

Find me with a book, on a train or bus or a capitalist coffeeshop. Find me half alive in our shared world and that of the book’s. Decide that my colored pants and grey hat create an intriguing ensemble, ponder over the tan-less nature of my skin. Figure I am cute enough to approach, buy me coffee and sit. Sit and ask about the book in my hand. Anticipate a suspicious gaze, a hesitation in my eyes. But just wait. Wait for me to sip that coffee and then brace yourself. Don’t be frightened by the exuberance in my voice, absorb enough of my over-worded analysis. Just watch my eyes and how they animate and support my thesis. Feed me your best lines, watch me laugh and point out your half-merited efforts. Ask me questions, never stop asking. Talk literature, politics and culture. Tango with me in a spiced dialogue of random facts and existential questions. Ask for my number, but put out your hand. Watch me drop my phone into your hands and tell you why not.

Text me maybe, anticipate sporadic responses. Know I sleep in napped intervals, I may not always respond in a timely fashion. But I will, eventually and my responses will be odd, maybe funny. Expect eccentricity, continuous analysis and decoded allegories. Ask me how I am and I’ll reciprocate states of being in ice cream flavors. Ask me what I’m doing and I’ll write you an exposé of my actions. Ask me, ask me, ask me. Life to me is an endless maze of unresolved questions and undiscovered answers. Fall for me, in the labyrinth that is my existence. Kiss me and more, feel raw emotion, expect passion but hurt. Maybe months will pass and maybe one day, we’ll sign a lease for some overpriced downtown closet. Maybe there will be tan-less babies with metaphorical names. Maybe you’ll have the acute awareness of the complicated but colorful. Maybe you’ll die, knowing you haven’t just survived, but actually lived. Lived presently in the here and now, in the zealous permanence of a girl like me, who reads, and who will write you worlds worth suffering for.