she didn't mean to be a rose

she is the age of innocence, staring longingly at the sarcasm she'll wear when she's jaded, but she isn't quite there yet. she says she's big enough, old enough, but when she tries irony on for size it pools off her egret shoulders, on to the floor, and she must stick with secondhand sincerity.

summer peach drips down her arms and she doesn't know what to do with her hands as she's dreaming, dreaming. head so high in the clouds she comes down in antarctica, confusion in her eyes made up songs in her ears, peach juice freezing on her skin.

when she lies in bed crying, her eyes perfectly dry, her hands not-quite-enough-enough fasten soft around the bars of her headboard. morning dawns red spiral imprints in her palms, pressed to the condensation windows, blood hello to the sunrise.

it's not that she's lonely, it's just that she's alone. small pale press against the worn fibers of the carpet, with only those lights on in the whole world and her face lit up blue with anything, though really she's just waiting.

autumn falls in with a bang and a crash around her shoulders and between the frail creases of her spine and her mouth drowns so thick in words it forgets them. she barely notices save for the mosquito bites depressing on her raised skin, and the peach-juice-icicles shattering against the concrete.

if she wished her fingers were strong, it wouldn't ever be to play the piano, but to look between those secret summer pages to find out what keeps a person warm when they laugh. but she doesn't wish that, four dreams slouch through her tethers, lift her feet from her shoes.

she turns her homework in again blank, with answers written in only she can see, on the back of nature sweet and autumn fall leaves, and again she doesn't mind that she gets a zero. a zero's just a number to fall through into white, like snow, like antarctica, like dreams.

and the cold of winter doesn't pull a scarf around her neck because she's still not old enough and there aren't any peach-stains on her arms anymore. she's not lonely, so no one notices the day when the wind just blows her away.