Skirt Over Jeans

I had been reading poetry all day so naturally, a new poem.

Skirt Over Jeans

Skirt over jeans,

the redhead wooed me first,

with her sharp tongue but gentle touch

I wished her to love me

As she loved the girl with the jet black, short hair

And I cried

And I yearned

And I dreamed and imagined

For a day that I would be that girl confined to a wheelchair

Only to have the spunky redhead tend to me

and love me

In her flowing skirt over jeans.

I must have been a girl of less than fourteen

Not understanding but a single thing

of what I felt when I saw her

light up my eyes as she lit the screen before me.

I watched her, religiously, for 120 hours,

Deliciously, for one year and 8 weeks

and over again

as I went to school,

in both seventh and eighth grades,

with my skirt over jeans.

I ignored stares and murmurs

for I had a stronger force compelling me

to the charming, fictional redhead

who existed, not in my world

but in someone else’s,

smiling and speaking wittingly,

to her young female companion,

who had needed her only slightly less than I did

when I devoted myself

to that redhead who preferred her skirt over jeans.

In the years since,

I must have forgotten her,

lost her in the shuffle of fleeting infatuations

that I had concocted for myself unintentionally,

trying to fill the void she left within me,

that astounding redhead

with her knee-length skirt over a pair of old jeans.