14. Ode To The Spanish Girl Who Never Stops Laughing

It is always Spain out where you are.

The last rays of the perpetually setting sun

always glow as they warm the brick

that never cools.

The water is always calm, where you are,

and you are always laughing.

I have been coming to this coffee shop

for five years now, studying

your world on the western wall,

trying to discern your secrets.

You have not aged a day since we met.

The creases at the corners of your eyes

have not deepened, the smile

in your eyes has not gone out.

You have never grown bored.

Is it lonely to smile all the time?

Does it hurt to never move?
Do you grow tired of watching

the same swatch of sky,

waiting for clouds that never come to

hide you from the sun?

Do you wish someone would repair the paint

peeling from the steps on which you are

perpetually perched?
Do you even know that it is peeling?
Can you see it in your periphery?
Can you consider it?
Or can you know only the vacant, cloudless sky

and the weight of your happy paralysis?

...And then I got distracted by the mural. Fun facts: there's no girl in the actual mural. And it might be Greece instead of Spain. But it's like the quintessential mediterranean. Anyway. The bit with the paint at the end might be lame. I might take that out. Its sole purpose was to question what the girl in the painting can and can't know, and whether her mind is, in fact, as blank as the sky. What might be more effective for that is to ask something to the effect of, "do you even know why you are smiling? Do you remember what joke made you laugh to the sky the moment before you found yourself frozen?" 

I also think the base narrative here would be a good one to pick up again sometime and drive more toward the nature of the present moment. Maybe this already does that. But in revision, I'd like to give it more philosophical resonance to the end that one is always trapped in the present moment, but that looking back, not even that will seem real. 

I don't know. I'm happy with it, on the whole.