Exponential Growth

There was still the lingering scent of rebellion on her fingertips and the slightest decay of her cells gave her a look of someone a few days older than she must have been. They started to look at her differently, for she was someone who was farther away from them than they would have liked her to be. Like a mockingbird and the children who played down the street, she lived vicariously through the sounds she made when nobody was watching. She was a photograph of ecstasy, a rough-sketch of a model. Something that never did justice to what that something could have been. Everyone despised her execution of breath, so much so that she managed to hold it for a week straight. Slowly but surely falling out of reality, that same reality that had flown away over the Harlem renaissance so many years before, and onto a broken watch promise. She watched and watched until the menial behavior began to make a difference and then she stopped. Saints and martyrs were appearing before her, beckoning her on to somewhere with better health insurance a much lower acceptance rate, but she couldn’t find the heart in her to leave the last of her possibilities to fend for themselves. In the nighttime she wished for the dawn, at the dawn, she hoped for afternoon, and in the heat of the sun, she prayed the moon would come quickly. Dwindling away the hours, she looked only for the next moment in which to be discontented. However, mockingbirds do not fly at night and so, with a whistle and a little jump, she managed to reach the second star to the left and fly off to somewhere where irrelevancy was savored and all the scars she had that dotted her skin looked more like constellations than discrepancies. It was a wonder that anyone wondered about her at all.