You Don't Know Joe

I obsess over a girl in my class, the one with the dark hair. The girl has dark hair, not the class. It’s sleek until you move closer to her, then its poofy like the tull of a prom dress. From across the room, she is what I envision to be Spanish women from black and white movies: the ones with rolling curls that collect somewhere in the middle of their backs, with blood red flowers behind their ears and lacey dresses, but only black or red. Except the virgins wore white, but somehow the girl in my class seems too exotic to be virginal. Not that she’s promiscuous, just knowledgeable…she knows that exploring her sexuality doesn’t mean quite the same thing as it did to her mother and grandmother when they were becoming women. She knows God won’t hate her if she indulges in her instinctual desires, but embraces them as a part of life. They never had to go to college, after all. Her mother and grandmother. They had to concern themselves with saving their flowers or peaches or whatever euphemism for a vagina was popular with Spanish women back in the day.La trucha. El arbusto. And they probably got married earlier. Probably just to have sex.From across the room, she is elegant, perfect. When she comes closer to you however, something is wrong- distorted in a way. Like if some hooligan drew a pencil mustache on the Mona Lisa in a museum one day: unnoticeable from the doorway, but when you get closer you find the flaw.