Rebekah

I met you at Arby’s. In line for a roast beef sandwich with coupons from your local paper. I never understood why Arby’s puts out coupons. Puts out like a cheap whore, you had said. “With discounts,” I agreed as you paid for your sex with your coupons. Delicious meat packed between two buns. Arby’s really knows how to treat a man.

We started to talk and you waited with me while they toasted my buns. Right then I was wishing that it was you toasting my buns. When I got my sexy sandwich, we sat down together and you said, “Baby, what’s your profession?”

I grinned at you, Cheshire cat-like and sexier than both our sandwiches combined and said, “I’m a stripper.” You sort of blinked at me so I had to say, “No, really.”

“Well, okay, but what do you do?”

“I take off my clothes and sit in men’s laps and whisper things of romance into their ears. I’m a stripper and a poet, all for the price of one.” He seemed to get it then. I saw the sadness in his eyes.

“What did you want to be?” he said.

I had about finished my sandwich by then. I felt nervous as hell because I really sort of like ol’ No-Name. “Jane Goodall,” I told him, and then I threw away my trash and thought about that reg on Tuesday, Mike, and how much he’d love this story whispered in his rich, middle-aged ear.

Static on the paper. College-ruled lines on the TV. (I still can’t figure out how to break the paranoia.)

I am every bit as awkward and difficult as I come off. Who was it that put me in this confident, easy-going skin? And when am I allowed out?

Today I made six origami fortune tellers. I wrote “you’re beautiful” on the inside of every single flap and left them on various shelves in the library. I hope nobody pretty finds them. I want that heavy girl with the acne who sits in the back of my chemistry class to find one, to take it home and show her mom. I want that awkward Hindu girl to find one, the girl who barely speaks any English, but knows enough to understand what the fortunes say. I want everyone who has ever felt sad or excluded because of their body or their face to find one and to understand that they are beautiful, even if I have to kill a thousand trees to make all the tellers.

I always want to be “that girl.” Not that girl, the one who drinks and can’t seem to keep her skirt in place. But the one with three books in her bag and scrapes on her knees because she lost count of the steps. Again.

When I was in fifth grade, a boy on the bus told me, “My mom says people with a lot of beauty marks are beautiful.”

The boy next to him, his friend, said to me, “Yeah. You have a lot, but you aren’t very beautiful.”

When I was in fifth grade, I had a lot of beauty marks. But when those boys were in fifth grade, they were never allowed to be line leaders.

I want to see the great minds together.

What would Wilde do to Whitman when no one was looking? And what would Whitman write of it? Perhaps they’d be gentle and tender, for minds so priceless need not be whiplashed. And would Whitman’s words then be of praise to a slow and sweet lover? Or maybe his words would be roaring and passionate, and their sex would be rough and hard because life is rough and hard and you don’t learn anything from soft and sweet. You don’t sell books or impact lives with sugar and fairies.

What would Van Gogh do if he got a hold of Dali? Would he shake him by the shoulders and say, “What is in your head?” Or would he find out himself? Suck the answer off his lips and into his own mouth. To have a taste of Salvador Dali’s inspiration. But then what would become of Dali? Would he curse Van Gogh? Demand an ear in trade for his creativity? Maybe they would lie together, and touch each other, and through their kisses they would mix creativity like they would mix paint, and neither’s work would suffer. Only improve.

I would like to see the great minds together. Because when they undoubtedly fucked things up, we’d get enough tear stains on canvases and angry inkblots from broken pens to want to start again.