At the bar

Intended to be a departure from the suburban mundane

But instead it substantiates the mundane

The faces symmetrical, mirror images of the retail banners that splash across my vanilla algorithm

Age, sex, location, all generating the toothy grins selling me a life designed

By marketing interns hired to sell tech vests and minimalistic twin sets

Perfectly suited for the coasts of Maine

I’ll never be that

I’m just the girl behind a whiskey on the rocks

Trying to reconcile my neurotic thoughts of trauma and discontent

With the expectations of this perfectly attractive population generating the national GDP

I work as twice as hard

My thoughts generating triple the effort of these plastic bodies

That diminish mine as I walk through the door

Who created the haves and have nots?

The lines of delineation tearing through my flesh as I strive to please them all

At work, at home

In the past, the present

God help the future as it hobbles through lessons never learned

We smile as we try to ignore our inevitable demise

The smile heals

At the same time that it hurts

And lies

And pushes the mess under the bed

Until the next time we all need a good old fashioned meltdown

As if we never saw it coming