She rises up from the waves of her sheets with mist running from the windowsill and her backbone and neck treated badly, thus she misplaces herself first as she accidentally knocks over a few books when she trips forward. Looking down, after barely catching a crisp bestseller and J.D. Salinger, she fishes another book off from the carpet and deposits it back on its respective shelf along with the other two. Stretching her arms, she returns to proceeding to the bathroom, then to the kitchen where she shakes up coffee for herself, and for herself only.
Later she proudly dons her favorite pair of sneakers - the ones with traces of pristine white and laces of sunshine yellow. Like the wannabe stylist she is, she dolls herself up with a cardigan of red and white spots, choosing a scarf of light pink to conceal her rosy neck. She feels rather—this she won't convey to you over a loaf of any kind of bread—ancient, with a band of fake gold twisted around a wrist, a dangling clock laced around her neck, and the tattoo of her heart shimmering against her fabric, coffee pumping like a fever in her veins and the outside frost already dancing across her lips. She feels ancient, because this dormitory is cluttered with mummies—she knows it—and her sketchbook is ancient as she hefts it into her adroit hands, fables pressed and shaded into spirals and jaws. Ancient, ancient, ancient.
She wants to smell like roses before she does pancakes, so she meanders down the corridor, through the quiet campus, and through the front doors of her college and skulks stealthily around blocks and into her parents' garden. She doesn't knock on the door of her parents' house because they would still surely be soundly asleep, and she owns a key to their garden, imparted to her with trust. She enjoys the lilies and petunias for a few minutes, blindly touching them as if she could feel their color, then she passes by lovelier flowers and crouches before the roses, tempted to touch their thorns... but she doesn't. Stalking down a path and locking herself out the garden, she stares at the house awhile and takes glimpses back at the flowers, then leaves, hunching a little like a shadow in an alley.
The brilliance of the morning touches her. Her cheeks are hot and her heart is enamored with the wintry sunrise, the horizon fleetingly showing off pleasant hues of entwined purple and orange. Her breath meeting library glass doors spreads out as she enters to join in trysts of exasperated love and formidable dragons, her feet barreling her forward into a world of mystifying battles and benign mistletoe appearances (much to her chagrin). She dips her aching toes into the throes of stories, and in the middle of a delicious afternoon she signs herself up for deliberately written adventure and tantalizingly giddy romance. The clock in her heart is ticking by. She excuses herself from her friend, the librarian, and whisks herself into the skittish streets of New York, bearing a cup of chocolate on the way to art class.
Her thoughts are shrouded with unabated dragon fire, dashing around the seams of her sanity, which she has checked are not so grim with an okay disposition. She sits atop the cusp of a menagerie of puerile thoughts, illustrious words and elegant illustrations sighing in the wind and washing into her ears. And as magical and dizzying as it sounds, she wishes there were more so their number could pass the count of her sun-ups and sun-downs, her childhood acquaintances, and her pet bird feathers combined.
Prim as she is, she bends crookedly, and her smile is halfway perfunctory, the curls and lines of it being trailed with ragged accuracy and mischief. She has days of runny noses and days of sobbing that twist into dry, deserted pages and haphazardly tossed away assignments, but her tousled hair from the jungle of her plain bed is a halo drizzling upon her figure, and the roars, howls, and all there is in wildlife heaped in her windpipe are not useless at all. She is chiseled to become the warrior she is, just you wait. When you look at the clock and you gather it is midnight, a Rubicon, a incipient ultimatum, will shrivel up around her, and she'll no longer have to ready herself for the next round in the ring.
Because then she'll be the triumphant queen, looming over you, her hands—feeling mind-bogglingly too close and human—a guide and a touch of knowing, the glimmer in her frosty eyes a message and a tinkle of jest. Saying. Canting, in the same way she tilts her chin up. Painstakingly testing. Always trying. To render,
,
,
,
Fight.
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