Life = pi r²?
“Please stop that. It’s annoying. Put the swively chair back where you found it. THANK you.”
Boy, did Mr. Renak jolt back some memories, re-asserted like an old box of trinkets that had been harbored away in an old woman’s attic, swept of the dust that hid it from sight.
I take down a sheet of notebook paper from above my bed, a child parting with a blanket that had once served as a means of comfort- a shield to protect them from harm and ward off the monsters under the bed. It’s put away not because it’s no longer wanted, but because like the child, I know it’s best if I learn to move on.
I take it down, only to put it back up minutes later. Again, the thumbtacks are plucked from the plaster- but I just can’t seem to prevent myself from pushing them right back in to the corner of the poem you wrote me.
As much as I want to put every ounce of trust in my body into believing what you told me, that I was different from the others, that I was special, as days go by, I’m beginning to cast doubt on the legitimacy in that more and more.
“You’re the best girlfriend I’ve ever had, you know that, Shelby?”
Really? Then why did you leave the second a single obstacle crossed our path?
Maybe you just see life the same way you saw the assignments in the very geometry class where we met.
Life isn’t a math problem- there’s not just one set answer for every circumstance.
And you know what?
Sometimes what’s logical isn’t always what’s best.
I put the poem away in a drawer, the rest of my collages framing a painfully desolate white square where it once hung.
“I’m over him now,” I tell myself. “I’m with someone else now, and I’m over him.”
I say this and pretend not to notice that the flower you gave me on our first date, laminated to preserve its memory, still lays untouched from where it first was hung.
“You said there’s tons of fish in the water, so the waters I will test.”
-Katy Perry, Thinking of You.
