manic pixie dream girl by Sakshi Umrotkar (17, California)

I. manic pixie dream girl: 

has hair that’s fried just enough to still be polite. a porcine snort and a delicate twirl.  

sparkles in his eyes, the halo so bright it creates a stubborn ring of light in his irises that activates when she appears, like mist, or like the mud that sprays on his face when a car rushes by in the city.  

shines in his city, his world of grim sadness and childhood trauma and daddy issues.  ​

---

backtalks racist senior citizens at the local bodega and dances with small, old veterans wearing suspenders to cheer them up. 

dances on the street in a lesson for him that says: no one’s looking.  

just doesn’t care, because she has no home to return to but his dreams and she has no responsibilities but the crushing weight of saving him and she has no chores but the 3 am midnight Walmart runs that make him feel alive.  

II. manic pixie dream girl is a real multitasker, but she won’t tell him that. so instead: 

she reminds him what 3 am looks like: a stripped-down acoustic cover of the real world. real world where he lives and misses her. 3 am smells like her: burns his nose slightly when he inhales.  

there is happiness taped to her insides, glued into her folded palms and fists. he reaches for it every night with jittery fingers. 

the key to his mind is his body. his body likes the way she molds into his frame, bones locked, skin and cartilage gooey on his bed at night where he unloads confessions into her, filling her with leaky faucets and detached fathers and promotions that were stolen from him at work. 
 
there is an assembly line inside her, he thinks, that folds his sadness into a ketchup smiley face or a cheeky one-liner muttered by her as their breaths mingle against his pillow.  

“you’re unreal,” he says, as a compliment, not a truth.  

III. she’s a function with an input and output, because he’s like that, you know, he sees assembly lines and functions when nature swells into his life. she is a force of nature. he is grim and beige, and when she traces a tree on his back as they lay in bed, he looks at her like he’s never touched paint. not even in kindergarten when his teacher made them draw the sun and apples and trees. her tree is a hieroglyph he cannot understand. too much for his cynical mind to process. she laughs, says she’s never met anyone like him, and he is suddenly protective — jealous of the previous junkies who messed her up, taught her that skin can be cut and hair can be pulled and dignity can die a slow death. 

when he continues pouring grief into her, she searches him for room too. she looks for answers about that missing dignity and the sting of past entanglements that left her blotched. and she feels unreal when he doesn’t see the scar tissue. 

when the falling action arrives, he finally understands, and she is gone. 

this is how the universe planned it (is what she’d say if she were here).