Beautiful Grit

I saw her not from across the room, but sitting next to me on a bench as we waited
It's harder to observe a person when they're so close to you, but that's what I did
I noticed the braid in her hair was slightly more loose on one side and that she had bitten the edge of her left index nail off
I watched her pick at it as her knees started to bounce in anticipation
She had an alternating twitch of anxiety
I could almost see her nerves trigger each one
I could feel her heart start to pound next to me
I could hear her inhale and imagined her lungs thanking her for finally giving into a motion that should have been involuntary
Her skin was flawed with beauty marks and scars that seemed to tell stories
I was even more intrigued because she used her hair to hide them
She had a story
I wanted to ask
Instead I sat back and told it to myself

She fell in love young and he loved her for her battle wounds
the way the world quietly crushed everything she loved
the way she responded to being denied
the way her heart seemed bruised the perfect hue of purple and black
yet housed her greatest love for him in the darkest corner of everything he didn't know

She was misunderstood most of her life
never able to marry eloquent words constantly divorcing sentences in an effort to share custody of a poem
never able to make love to music efforts futile in a repeated dry exchange of fluids across her lips as she sang off key about a forgotten truth

She was flawed by her openess and scarred by her self inflicted pains of denial
a constant reminder of how tainted her memories would flow
undemanding of her attention until she was alone at 3am

She crashed into everything with a force mighty and unapologetic
for disrupting hearts and lives
for invoking thoughts
for creating fierce lovers
for creating an uprising
for initating evolution in hearts

She left them speechless, breathless and lost
without her to guide their thoughts
because without her their world was dim and shaded grey
without being able to peek at her flaws they only knew what they didn't know
that they couldn't live or breathe

Now I looked at her in awe of her beauty
the grit in her eyes
without knowing the truth cascading down her arm as she reached into her side
pocket
She took out a pen, black the ends chewed on and frayed
I couldn't look away as she permitted the ink to stain her left hand
Palm down she placed her hand on mine
and transferred her story as my own