She's something like okay. She's just about... normal and a half. Maybe. If you look at her from a distance, squint your eyes and turn your head slightly to the left, she seems like a girl writing some random thing, yeah. She seems like she's focused, intent. She doesn't look mad at all. But when you look close, everything changes up, and her eyes kind of unfocused because she's probably reading some story or writing something or dreaming out loud like she did when she was five. She'll tell you all about it if you give her a chance, though maybe not if you scare her off first.
She's halfway pretty sometimes, or at least she has pretty pieces in the thousand-piece puzzle that makes up her appearance. The corner of her upper lip, five eyelashes, her second biggest toe, and the space beneath her eyebrows if she managed to get a wax that month. She's got black nail polish that's hung on for a long time, but now it's chipped off at the sides, leaving a little patch in the middle, like tiny puddles of ink on her hands. She scratches the same place on her head over and over, lets the little white flakes drift down to her sweater where they'll never leave. She bites the inside of her lip till it bleeds, then licks the wound because it has a taste now where there wasn't one before. She has moles that won't ever get removed, probably, even though she spares them a worried glance now and then. She twitches. She falls in love with people who don't exist and out again just as easily.
She doesn't like to be looked at because it's just not worth the willpower it takes to go to the gym (willpower is a limited thing after all, like the ozone layer or a human lifespan), though there's a painted picture of beauty hanging up her mind of what she could be. There's a plaque below that picture, a caption that says, "Maybe, Someday. But Probably Not." She likes adverbs more than she knows she should and will do verbal battle with anyone who says that what the author means means anything at all. She's a comma addict. She has a chart in her head, probably on the other side of the painting, and it's got a great big list of all the things she loves, and if you love them too then you'll be her new best friend. She's scared of getting stabbed in the eyes but has no fear of drowning. She misses who she was as a kid, because it isn't who she is now, and damn but that five year old had so much confidence and stupidity.
More than all of that, more than anything, she has this golden ball of potential, stuck right in the middle of her ribcage. This glowing, transcendent, ephemeral orb of I Could. And if she taps into it, if she touches it, the world becomes crazy beautiful. It's just not always easy to reach, and sometimes she forgets it's there. Because the But Probably Not is also there, like a cloud, obscuring everything else, and it's so big sometimes. It's overpowering and massive. It's the enemy of I Could. And she gets these ideas, you know? She was going to join the Air Force. She was going to write a cooking blog from the perspective of a Sim. She was going to clean her entire house. She was going to lose fifty pounds and become a personal trainer. She was going to make a comic book. And way back when, back in the days before she had any sense, she was going to fill an entire wide-rule single-subject notebook with numbers. She's got stories to prove that she's not too normal, not too boring, but sometimes she wishes she was a little bit more eccentric. A little bit crazy.
Maybe she wishes she were you. Did you ever think about that? Maybe she's jealous of you. Wants your life, to take your successes and make them her own, or take your failures and tell herself, "Well, I could do better," and then get it done. Not really likely, though. The But Probably Not gets in the way too often.
Right now, though, she can see the I Could. And she's thinking, Maybe. Maybe not Monday, maybe not on New Year's, maybe not when this other thing is done and I have time and this and that are out of the way. Maybe Now. Maybe this is it, that thing the I Could wanted her to do her whole life.
Then again, probably not. Probably she'll just cling here to this web of thought and dream of the same things she's dreamed before, until inspiration hits and she's spinning her wheels again. Gets ideas. But that's all normal, right? Normal and a half. Something like that.
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