Fiction: The Sometimes Girl

Sometimes, in the mist of daydreams, I swim alone in a muted blue ocean in the sky. Here and there birds made from paper fly by. I float inside this ocean of calm holding my breath while silently and slowly, the water chases my shadow under the earth.
    Sometimes reality disappears on me - either behind a set of gloomy clouds or some tall buildings. I wait for it to come back. I look and look and keep on looking but it doesn't appear. I shift about nervously in my skin, not knowing if I should still wait or leave.
     Sometimes dreams I have never known before, arrive in the mail. They come boxed and wrapped in pretty yellow papers. I laugh with great glee as I hold the boxes in my hands. But when I open the boxes, one after the other, all they contain are empty spaces where things used to be.
    Sometimes, there is no me. There is only the shell that represents me. I wear it like a winter coat - struggling to stay warm while cold wind keeps seeping in through the buttons holes.
    Sometimes and only sometimes, a girl with my face appears at my front door. She is here even when she is not. She demands I return to her what I have stolen - her face. I have no reply. I stare at her and wonder why she is not me or why I am not her. She is perfect. Her hair is perfectly shaped with no strays. Her skin is a luminous sheen of satin. She curls her deliciously pink lips at me with a smirk that says I am superior and I am the only one. As if to say, there is no me. The me is a thin copy of her - a mimic of a mimic. The girl knows this and she acknowledges this with another smirk upon her pink lips. She lifts her head higher so that she is taller than me. Her ankles have band-aids on them and yet, she stands like someone with all the power in the world. She waits for me to respond. But again, I have nothing to say. She crosses her arms and stares down at me and waits for me to disappear or fade away. But I close the door on her instead.
    For awhile, the girl keeps visiting me and I keep silent until one long summer day, she stops visiting. I begin to believe she have truly gone away. But every now and then, in my dreams, she appears all glowing with perfect certainty that time is on her side. But she always fades away as if she knows she isn't going away forever. And she always knows I cannot be her. Not then, not now nor later.

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