I spy

She watches him. Lingering on his every word. I spy from a distance, but she could never notice, her head is too full of him. I see her mind revisiting the same thoughts over and over: her body positioning, the movement of her hair - how it sticks to her lipstick and she curses the open window. Her eyes, how she widens them when he speaks, purposely, in hoping that he will discover a certain depth in them. And her words, how she forgets all her wit, her weird, her intelligence, and can only wonder how incompetent she is; she cannot lace together one single sentence. A fog has settled upon every interesting part of her mind, so instead she dawdles with her shoe laces and examines her fingernails. He remains as silent and frustrating as ever. So she soon resorts to desperation, asking the daily questions that neither one of them could care less about: 'are you going out this weekend?', 'doing much tonight?', and occasionally the mention of a mutual friend - since their conversations rely solely on the topics they have in common. Most likely why they rarely speak. He aims to inflict a flavour of humour, it's not funny, but she laughs louder than she should, stopping only when she hears it for herself and is horrified by the noise that escaped her lips. He turns away from her and her smile is trapped. Stuck on her face for the next ten minutes because she has forgotten she is smiling at all; thinking again of how she must look through his eyes, what words she can speak next, and how she can mellow her voice to make it sound more seductive. 

When he leaves I watch her still. I watch as she pulls headphones from her bag, as she finally notices and dismisses that smile. I see her eyes slouch, her body mould back into the seat. She feels useless because she cannot show him who she is. She knows she is interesting, that she can be compelling, confident, yet she is sickened by who she becomes when he is near. She wishes to tell him that she is so much more. But whenever opportunity is near, the cycle begins once more.