A vignette about my beautiful best friend.
BY EVAN CAIN
VICE-PRESIDENT/ CO-EDITOR IN CHIEF/ ARTS AND CULTURE HEAD
Lexi is quiet. Loud. Powerful. She knows about things. Her thoughts splattered on the paper you will never see. Lexi loves and loves and loves and keeps on loving, even when they don’t. ABT people love, don’t they? That’s why the dancing girl likes it there. It feels like yellow and Val and memories of the day! They will remember you, don’t worry.
Is happiness the attitude or arabesque that the foreigners inspect? Or is it the broken pose behind the curtain, away from the stage, in the shadow? Or is there any at all? Lexi talks to me and says she likes to dance. I don’t believe her. She has to dance or there’d be nothing for the people of new times to remember.
The kids at school think she’s beautiful because her hair has been kissed by the sun and her eyes all the way from Hawaii. But she only sees the things she doesn’t have and wishes she did. She longs for the whispers to leave. Stupid. The whispers, I mean. You are every word meaning beauty.
Lexi, who taught you to coat your fingernails like butter on toast? And if I dip this brush tip in the tub of magic and let it cool it’ll coat just like that and look just like yours? I like your black boots and the jewels around your neck. Only Lexi could do that, though, not you or me.
Next week she comes over and asks if they will remember. You build palaces out of paragraphs. You build cathedrals. She sweeps her feet up one then another, one then another. She breaks on the paper she hides. There’s one thing she doesn’t know. We will remember you, dancing girl. Always and forever.
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