She Was A Corner Street Girl.

She was a corner street girl, wrapped in faux fur and enduring winter nights with a flick of her faded hair. In the street lights she looked perfect, all untouched and Barbie-flawless. The dim orange blaze of the corner lamp and the sudden blue flashes of traffic made her shutter and flicker in and out of the scene, like a film reel ghost.

She’s there then she’s gone, just like that.

But in the stark, judging light of the day folk she looks more like a withered flower. Still pretty, but you wouldn’t pick it for the vase. Her eyes are bloodshot blue and are lined with smudged black and lashes tired from fluttering all night long. Her lips crack open with every movement and every fibre of her winces at every crack.

Her smiles are grimaces. Her hair is lank and seems to sigh and sag with her as she deflates in front of me.

“I was never good with mornings.”

She takes a sip of her coffee and doesn’t even notice there isn’t any sugar in it. The café is full of people but in the morning they’re always ‘just leaving’. Her fingers are lined with tiny bruises which correspond with the ones on her legs and neck, she notices me staring and grins and her whole mouth bleeds;

“I’m a spotted leopard, but you know, I can change my spots.”

I ask, why does she does do this? She grimaces.

“You really wanna know?” I don’t nod but I shake. I shake all over.

“Because it means I can be whoever I wanna be, I can be a different person every night, and when I get tired of being that person, I can change. Nothing’s ever permanent, not even this,”

She draws her sleeve back and there’s a huge bruise in the vague shape of a hand on her forearm.

“A souvenir from playing Tiffany. But no one ever has breakfast at hers.”

She looks at me, past me, past the street corner where I found her and past the bridge across the river. She goes all around the world with that sad-grey gaze and when she gets back I already know it’s somebody else looking at me.

“You know how I told you that no one ever leaves me?”

Yeah, I remember. She was Catherine Hepburn and she smelt of a hangover. Her voice was three notches higher then whoever this is.

“It’s because I always leave first. And, anyway. It’s never me that’s leaving, is it? It’s always someone else. You can’t leave someone you’ve never met.”

Oh, contraire. People do it all the time.

On buses. In streets. Out of buildings. In airports and off ships.

People leave each other behind every single day without knowing it and every single day 6.97 billion hearts are broken, one by one.

“So, all those people, they never get to leave me, because I leave as soon as they look at me, before we shake hands or speak a word. I leave before they even know I’m there.”

Most people do.

“And in the morning, when they do go, they’re not leaving me behind, no. They’re leaving Cindy or Louise or maybe Wendy to pick up what the night forgot to take with it.”

I feel kinda sorry for her. Whoever she is. That would mean you were avoiding who you are, avoiding being yourself just so you don’t get hurt.

“Yeah, so?”

She flicks her hair and her voice is so confident but somewhere in the back of it I hear the girl I picked up all those nights ago who I fell in love with. I want to pull her out, put her back together and heal the bruises and make her stay. I want to tie her down and reconstruct her.

I tell her you can’t run away from yourself forever.

She smiles, differently, to the side.

“No, sweetie, you can’t.”

And she’s gone,

“Just one night at a time.”

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- Mikee Sto Domingo.