Cotton candy bubble gum, pink, goes pop. Her hands are in her pocket, hiding the neon orange polish on the chipped nails bitten down to the skin. And her jeans hang casually off of her hips, held up by the studs encircling her waist. She eyes the chain wallet of a lonely male passer-by jealously while her sunglasses slip down the bridge of her freckled nose. She pushes them back up and looks again forward. The cracked sidewalk continues on, weeds with spikes for petals poke out of the fissures in the concrete. She can’t help but smile when she looks down to see a graffiti heart painted under her blue Converse shoes. A car drifts passed and vanishes into the haze of humidity strewn about the valley‘s atmosphere like a blanket. Pop goes another cotton candy bubble, breaking the eerie silence of the otherwise empty lane. Her mind wanders, imagination waltzing along beside her like a separate entity searching for manifestation in written word. Her hair, knotted in a crude ponytail, bobs as she steps. Only one with careful eyes would notice the swing in her hips as she walks. A subtle detail that would go unnoticed otherwise, like the melancholy expression her sunglasses shield. Nothing happens. She does not meet a mythical creature and no knight in shining armor chooses to rescue her on this particular walk around the neighborhood, but, stretching her arms up to the sky, she know it will happen someday. It has too.

If you ever saw her outside of this lonely hoping and loping about the streets of this small town, you wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t see that she has a notebook under one arm and her heart under the other while a pen is tucked neatly behind her ear. It wouldn’t even occur to you that she has something to say, even when she wants to say it.