You think you know me as you sit across from me in the subway your bored gaze sliding up from the floor to my perfectly manicured toes festooned in a brilliant shade of Mai Tai Pink. But you don’t. You don’t know how often those toes have curled in frustration, straining out of towering heels with an unyielding desire to be back on solid footing, running through grass or jumping off piers into water and feeling nothing below, just air whooshing in between the gaps. You don’t know how the littlest toe hides slightly behind the others and when I truly felt the most comfortable and the most loved I would jokingly rest my feet on his lap and ask him to stretch out the littlest one so it could stand out from behind the rest.
You think you know me as you glance at my legs in a short summer skirt as we stride down the street on the way to a meeting, but as your gaze slides up my legs you don’t pause on the one inch scar below my right knee but continue upward without hesitation. You flicker right past the permanent mark of the moment I thought I was invincible. You missed an exciting story of a varsity sport, a rival college, and my family’s first rugby game ending in a hospital visit with a torn ACL and 6 months of rehab. But most of all you missed the surprising love I have of a dirty, vicious and competitive sport which you might not have gathered from the immaculately pressed skirt and smooth legs I trounced by on. You missed the legs that took me to foreign places, into the fields of Ecuador where my relatives told me stories of our heritage amidst fields of wildflowers and poverty. Or the time these legs carried me through the streets of Jerusalem and into a tiny tented shop where 4 girls prayed over a mezuzah with a stranger who taught them more about religion than any other lesson before. You missed the feelings of strength and invincibility in which these legs can propel me in a race alongside my brother or weaving through the backwoods and farms of Maine.
You think you know me as your eyes asses the flatness of my stomach as I slide into a chair of a packed meeting, and as I sense your scrutiny I suck in slightly my belt sagging with newfound room. I feel your smirk and I sense my insecurities flooding back. I mentally ensure everything is in place, clean and immaculate. Because I know you expect that, for me to not only be outwardly perfect but to also be everything you can check off in a neat square box. To sit at that table I need to be someone who has wit, charm, grace and intelligence. For I know that if my outward appearance was unkempt, or unflattering the intangible would be less valuable and shine a little less bright. You don’t know that I get so stressed sitting in that damn office chair that I end up eating 5 peanut butter cups in a row and then feeling sick with pressure and an upset stomach. You don’t know the weight I feel from having to be a charming hostess but also a cunning businesswoman. You don’t know that inside I’m really an introvert. That growing up I would sneak away from my friends to read alone in the library and that I hate staying out late with clients, and pray for the moments they decide not to grab that drink after dinner. You would never know, because there’s no way to tell.
You think you know me as you stare at my sparkling Yurman ring of twisted gold as I softly trace a trail of condensation down the side of a wine glass during our first date. You don’t know that while I’m sitting here with you, my mind is actually travelling back to a time when I worked 14 hour days in a glass studio making pieces of hand blown art and falling in love with my Czechoslovakian teacher. You don’t know that when he kissed me that summer it was like the world stopped in that sugary movie moment, and that I feel as though it never started turning quite the same way again. You don’t know that these hands have braided the hair of girls sold on the sex trade in Thailand, or held dusty chalk to cement walls in dark classrooms in Kenya while singing the alphabet to children who would never use it. You don’t know that when I get nervous I rip at my nails, attacking them and that when my father sees me the first thing he looks at are my hands in order to see the state of my heart.
You think you know me as you play with my dark hair, wrapping it around your fist trying to entangle yourself in me, trying to get as close as possible, and for that moment I feel safe because I think you really know all of me, and I know all that is you. But the silky strands slip through your fingers like grains of sand and you don’t know that I try to give you everything, while my body shuts down and my hair starts falling out under the weight of it all.
You think you know me as you avoid eye contact or advanced warning, packing your things, our memories and my hope away into cardboard boxes with the words fragile scribbled across the top. You stop suddenly and throw an explanation over your shoulder- “I never saw you cry, I never saw you vulnerable, I guess I never really saw you.” Which is crazy I think, because if you knew me, you must know I would rip open my chest for you to peer into my soul, if only you had just told me that you needed me to. Your eyes light on mine for the last time, and I see such love and truth it hurts to look away, and in that moment I know the internal battle to which Orpheous lost, but then I’m forced to look away because I’m staring at the back of a closed door.
I thought I knew you, but I never did. Perhaps in the end you never knew yourself and I didn’t know enough to ask and neither did you.
About Mali Rose
Mali Rose is a writer for Rookerville. She enjoys binge watching Scandal, doing random activities that produce a very strange life resume, eating a copious amount of Skinny Pop and going to empty dive bars. Rose dreams of giving up the corporate life and moving to Maine or Thailand but fears that the internet accessibility would affect her monogamous relationship with Netflix. Rose lives with Justine Kolsky in Manhattan. They have 1 dead and 2 questionably living plants together.