girls would change their faces to look as sullen as possible whenever a camera was around. it was championed by vogue, elle, everyone. 'frown yourself thin,' read magazine covers in chain grocery stores across middle-america. people gradually began to forget what dimples were.
i remember you wanted to be a model very badly. you would blink slowly and try to look glamorous, like some species of shitty, retarded swan. it really was beautiful. you wanted to be a model but you wrote poetry too.
you got so frustrated trying to get a break that it scared me sometimes. you would scatter your portolio all over the floor, play three angry chords on your mandolin, and scream into a pillow. i was afraid of you mostly, but also curious. what was going on in your head? what were you thinking about when you frowned for the camera?
i asked you once what you thought about. you said when you looked into a camera you thought about floating. you tried very hard to float, put all of your energy into it. but you could never float, and that made it hard not to cry. not crying was the real work of being a model.
when you wore a scarf you looked like a cross between a bulldog and a ladybug. i was never afraid of the bulldog part, that was the part i liked. it was the ladybug that scared me, so small, fragile. i was afraid of crushing you with the weight of my little toe, breaking your tiny bones.
once i was looking at my facebook near midnight and you called me and said, uhm can we talk, really fast, no punctuation. i said of course.
you told me that you went on a trip when you were very young and there were all of these larks, and a mountaintop! there was a mountaintop. you weren't making any sense at all, so i said, what are you thinking about? you said you were thinking of larks. there was this old retarded man and it was raining hard and he held his umbrella above the larks and they flew away and he cried. you said that was what you were thinking about.
i felt very confused and sad, and asked if we could talk tomorrow. you said yes, we can talk tomorrow but it sounded blank and filled with the desire to be everything at once. you said you had to go work on your frown anyway. as you hung up the phone, i knew i would not hear from you tomorrow or ever again.
