Why are you in such a hurry, little girl?

You can’t keep running away from a world where you have no voice. That world isn’t going anywhere. The bronzer on your jawline and the shimmery powder on your eyelids aren’t going to make the blind sit up and take notice. The heels chafing at your toes and rubbing your ankles raw aren’t going to give you the platform you’ve been falsely promised.

What are you hoping for, little girl?

You read as though your books will be ripped out of your hands at any moment, you write as though you fear losing function of your hands, and when you plead for mercy of the silence that greets your words, your desperation cuts a ruthless line through your chest and bursts into the air like a flock of birds escaping a little boy with a slingshot aimed at their home. Yet when you sit down to pour it all onto paper, your colours are muted, your lines are uncertain, and the paper eventually finds its way amid the bills and the torn up to-do lists into the recycling bin.

Where are you going, little girl?

You wander the city in your best camouflage, standing out like all the other girls do. You get your hair cut short and stare superciliously down your nose at all the imagined slights you’re dealt. Your muscles strain from the quick clip at which you assault the pavement, pushing from one crisis to the next, but your mind only relaxes when you step onto a treadmill, racing to nowhere at 6 miles an hour.

Who do you want to be, little girl?

Who do you want to be, when you step off the scale and dispassionately (you think) note the 0.2 lb drop since yesterday morning, when you’ve cleaned until you’ve run the gamut of cleaning products under your sink, when the innumerable screens that litter your room finally wink off for the night, nestled in a careful imitation of order and meaning? Who are you, then?