Gone Girl

She was very exotic then.

She grew up with hippie parents

Who had lived in Japan,

And she brought weird and wonderful things to school

That we Texas kids had never seen.

Once she brought a small jar of cinnamon oil

Stuffed with toothpicks that had soaked awhile.

She gave me one, and though it burned my tender lips, 

My taste for cinnamon eclipsed everything else,

From that moment on.

And once, she brought some dried seaweed,

And several of us got a tiny piece of it

In a strange communion ceremony,

And we considered ourselves so lucky

To be her friends.

I spent the night with her one time when I was nine,

And she showed me her ouija board,

And Sunday morning when we got up,

We put dresses on. (She loaned me one!)

And I felt so fine in it, and we attended

A wild country church in an old rock house

Where some of the window panes

Had fallen out, and people rolled

On the floor in the aisles, 

While the tambourines shook.

And as the choir sang a repeating chorus,

She caught a lizard that darted over 

The old wooden bench we were sitting on,

And I admired her so,

For I wouldn’t’ve touched that thing with a ten foot pole.

Her hair was long and blond

And her eyes were blue,

And her older sister, Monique, was sixteen,

And already dating one of the coaches at school,

And we all figured she would, too,

For it was the wildest thing a young girl could do in our town, 

But she dropped out in eighth grade,

And we never knew where she went

Or what became of her.

She was so becoming.

I still see her in my mind,

Catching lizards right in time

With the gospel blues and the tambourines 

And eating seaweed, cinnamon on her breath,

Staring up into the sun.

She was becoming.

She was becoming.

She was going,

She was gone.

-jenn