On my Twenty-Fifth Birthday
This
year, I want to lose something.
Not
a pound
or a bad habit
(though
I would,
really),
but
something of moderate significance:
my
car
my cell phone
a notebook of poems finished but
never read.
I
want to feel an absence; to not quite know
what
is in it. To look
at
the drive way
or the bookshelf
knowing
I could fill it if I wanted,
knowing
there was something I once
wanted
more.
I
am told I will not be young forever. Already, I feel
the
old woman in my skin telling me
what
I should do, what I should
not
say.
I
feel her wrinkled cheeks
inside
my cheeks when I wake in the morning.
I
see her softening skin in the puddles
when
I walk, and she smiles
when
I smile. Sometimes I lace my fingers
through
the surface to touch her hand.
I
do not want to lose the old woman. I want
to
lose something she thinks
she
already knows.
