There she goes again.

The paper cut-out girl.

She’s wearing the same woolly coconut ice striped beanie, complete with panda ears. It’s something a kid would wear. Except, she’s not a kid anymore. Although, I wonder if that’s what she wants to be—an eternal child—never having to grow up.

She’s buttoned up tight in her wool check jacket, layered with a jumper and shirt so you can’t see her outline; the way her bones are jutting out. A body too thin to carry the weight of so much wool.

I saw her most days. I’m not sure if she’s going to school or work. Her thin legs are clad in tights and her feet—I can’t keep my eyes off the high top pink Converses. She wears them no matter the weather.

I think she wants to hide, but the hat and the sneakers make her conspicuous. Maybe it’s a way to only get people to notice parts of her, not the whole, because then they’d have to see how sometimes she walks slowly, carefully, and that each step seems painful.

She often carries a red and white backpack, and I can't help stewing over how she manages the weight when she wants to shed so much of her own.

Once I tried drawing her, but the lines were too faint, too scant as if I couldn’t pin her to the page. So I cut out a space in the paper where the girl should have been.

She was present in the world by the very space she was absent from it.