if her life is beautiful

+

Head tilted back to receive the sunlight full on your face, drawn like a flower toward its life-giving heat. (Completely alone and yet clearly visible is as close to safe as you know you can be.) Sand, vast stretches of soft white sand, and the sounds of the ocean to slow the painful staccato beating of your heart; paradise, just as you'd always imagined it. So young and yet already so deeply tired. Wishing this moment could stretch and stretch into eternity, or that you might simply dissolve into this place, lose your shape and your face and your treacherous skin, and become a part of the sunlight and the sand; or find your voice, finally and forever, in the ceaseless roar of the ocean.

You know, any moment now, one of your parents will break your reverie -- and for no other reason but that they simply like to break things. They feel the need to remind you of your place in this world: a low place. A cold place, far from the sun.

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I wonder about this girl. I wonder if her life is beautiful. I wonder if she was happy, at the moment this photo was taken, or if she was wishing, like I did at her age, that she knew how to dissolve.