Otherwise Unremarkable

I learned to read lips before I learned
they were lying.
Smiled when the room smiled
laughed half a second late,
hoping no one would notice
the seam.
They noticed.

Other girls had this language carved into their bones - 
the unwritten rules, the unspoken hierarchies,
who you’re allowed to sit with on Tuesday,
why yesterday’s best friend
won’t look at you today.
I took notes.
I studied.
I failed the test anyway.

And the cruelest part:
no one tells you there is a test
until you’ve already failed it
in front of everyone.

The lights in this building
are eating me alive
and I’m supposed to be
whole. Functional.
Already half-devoured.
The threads in my shirt
press into me like accusations,
fabric that refuses to stop.
My own skin
sits wrong on the muscle and bone,
a seam sewn by someone
who measured someone else.

I nod. I smile.
I carry it home in my teeth
and behind a closed door
I finally
put it down
and everything breaks.

There were clipboards
and checklists.
They looked right at me and saw
nothing that fit,
so they handed me back to myself
with a note that said:
try harder.
Dramatic. Oversensitive. Difficult.
Smart enough to know better, they said.
As if I didn’t.

A problem with no name
is still a problem.
I was still drowning.
They simply called it
being a bad swimmer.

I don’t know where the templates end
and I begin.
I have skinned other women’s mannerisms
and worn them to dinner.
Smiled their smiles.
Laughed their laughs.
Timed my pauses
to theirs.
It kept me alive.
It also kept me
missing.

Somewhere beneath all that careful theft
is someone who was never performed,
never practiced,
never made palatable.
She is raw and strange and real
and she has been waiting
in the dark
for thirty years
for me to stop pretending
she doesn’t exist.

That’s not nothing.
That’s not nothing.
That’s not nothing.