text: I am half-awake with my back to you on your bed while you sit at your instrument and tuck into your black and white keys deft and handsome; your hands curl and splay and the sound is switched off so all I hear is that fine collapse of plastic, chord roll and fingers tumbling across octaves. You end with an unknown cadence then stop. “Are you actually asleep?” You want me to be facing you, to watch you be deft and handsome for my benefit. I mutter and pull your white sheets up to my ears. You want to impress me. I am already there, but you don’t know this, couldn’t know this; I can say nothing to you. The second time we met you held up my chin and whispered *you’re really quiet, aren’t you?* You are not the first to say this and you will not be the last. I am new to you but not for long. I wish you didn’t long to be poignant because really I know this is all false. Really I imagined a boy fondling my hair, always pictured him maybe like you, pictured him thumbing my cheek bone smiling slyly; you tell me my eyes are huge and I think yes, I know. I think, where were you when I was unaware of these things. You seem confounded every time you stroke my leg and it is smooth. I am a mystery to you somehow, in my wordlessness and alien lack of stubble. I feel like I am tricking you but I think maybe you want to be tricked. I lay in your bed like an invalid and I can feel on my back your amusement, feel your brow crumple up, feel your hands graze the keys thoughtfully. Feel your mind maybe somewhere else. Briefly, sometimes, I feel your attention like something charging at me and it is all I can do to disappear before impact. Mostly, though, you say you don’t know any poetry but you write it maybe without considering it like this; when you sing it is poetic. You are a poetic liar. Your truths are less truthful. Your truths are stale before they leave your mouth when you are staring at me with frightening concentration and you say things like *wow, there are probably 9 different colours in your hair right now* because the sun is illuminating the white-blond wisps at my temples and here right now at the beach I feel beautiful in spite of you. I don’t know why you say these things, maybe because you think this way, because you feel them keenly. Maybe they are for my benefit because how could you know I am not this girl with huge eyes, with nine different colours in my hair. How could you know these things when I can say nothing to you. When I can say nothing to you and you feel me deeply enough to not think to ask. Once at a concert a man brushed past me quickly, grazed my shoulder with the back of his wrist. I could not see his face when he whispered *you are beautiful*. He did not stop and I did not turn around. Once at a party a boy wrote in blue pen on a napkin *you look like sun-drenched orchards, like cherry blossoms* and handed it to me, tall and sheepish. You are the fourth one I’ve kissed, I want to tell you. You know you were my first but I have not told you you were my fourth. Are my fourth. That you are my hundredth, maybe my thousandth. That you are not alone in thinking my face profound. So I know without you. When you sit perched like a bird at your computer and play halting seconds from your disarray of sound files and I kiss the back of your neck you do not turn around because you need these moments, need this falseness. I want to give it to you like an unwrapped gift. I want you to revel in your own unassuming insincerity because of the reasons I like you that you do not know about because I have not told you. *You’re really quiet, aren’t you?* It is one thing to be pretty and something else entirely to feel like it belongs to you.