paper dolls

Once there was a girl, He told her that her skin was too pale and that her eyes were too sad. He told her to wear colors other than black. She went home that night and dragged the blade of her pocket knife across the white of her inner thigh, watching as scarlet bloomed to surface. She called him on the telephone and said, ‘You would be proud, I’m wearing red tonight.’ She thought he laughed, but it sort of sounded like a sob. There was something beautiful about the rain, and on stormy days, he would always hold her on his couch and twirl his fingers in her hair. Sometimes she would feel a drop of wet on her cheek, and she told him that maybe he should check his roof, because it was leaking. It took her eight times to figure out that they weren’t raindrops, but his teardrops. The next time it rained, she stayed home and sat on her driveway, letting the sky water saturate her shirt and soak through to her bones. He taught her a lot of big words, like ‘quintessential’ and ‘superfluous’ and ‘agoraphobia’. She decided that she was probably a little agoraphobic because whenever she was without him, she was a nervous wreck. But maybe that was just the whole ‘love’ thing and not an anxiety disorder. The stories he told her were always so promising, about little girls with orange lantern cheeks and eggshell lips. He would call them paper dolls. But at the end of every one, the paper doll girl wouldn’t find her prince, and her heart would flicker and fade like dying lights. ‘Am I your paper doll girl?’ She asked once, watching as he bit at his chapped lips. I’m pretty sure that was when he started to crumble. ‘Only if you want to be,’ he rasped, and let go of her hand that he had been holding. A breathy sigh left her. ‘I don’t, because I want to find you.’ ‘You should have started looking a long time ago, then.’ The day after he left, she made a chain of paper dolls and wrote ‘me’ on every one. She was going to send them to him, but she forgot. They’re still on the corner of her desk, collecting dust beside her broken vase of dead tulips. She wouldn’t know where to mail them, anyway. Because she still hasn’t found him