Sky With Diamonds

J's hair is an array of camouflage against the urban extravagance, the electricity of autumn bustle; specifically, the tips of her ebony hair went from black to white to blue and ended up every color of the mirror reflected in the shadows of her clothes. The contours of her black sweatshirt, black tights, combat boots look somehow straighter, as though she has sacrificed the youth of costume jewelry with its round edges in favor of a princess cut diamond, chopped away to remove the princess part. She is every bit the modern, artsy city girl. (In the car, she began to sing in Japanese to the skids of drunk drivers on every side of the intersection.)

She should be sunken! Recently, J condemned herself to my old school until college, refusing to accept the cards dealt to her as a brilliant young woman, refusing to take a test that threatened her safety net. After all, if she got into a specialized school, she is convinced she'd crack in a few seconds. If she didn't get in, it would only take one. She should be sunken! The layers of soft feathers cushioning her from her fear are as warm and deceiving as ever, even as the temperature melts into freezing. As Marianne Williamson once said, "Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." There's something trapped inside my best friend, perhaps in a strangled binary, that is clawing at her uvula and gasping for light. There's something inside her that could destroy or save the world with a single chord of her electric guitar, with a single sweep of her charcoal pencil, with a single flip of her feet up and away over her head. She should be sunken! Because if she was sunken, she'd be driven to release those perfect demons and change everything.