What A Girl Wants

When I was thirteen

My bedroom floor

Was the bedroom floor

To end all

Bedroom floors

If you want to know

What kind of person

Any thirteen-year-old is

Just look at what they keep

On their bedroom floors

Now, mine looked like a mess

But it was actually

A very carefully-curated mess

Just the right magazines

Splayed open

So you could see their covers

Certain articles of clothing

Notebooks

With certain things written in them

The infrequent bit of make-up

A scrap of paper with a phone number on it

One rollerblade

That’s the kind of bedroom floor that says--

This is the room of a busy girl

A girl with dreams

A girl who’s going places

And if you walked into my room

And moved around the carefully placed items

You would think to yourself--

Wow, I want to be friends with this girl

And if you walked into my room

You would always

Always

Hear What A Girl Wants

By Christina Aguilera

I had it on a loop

Because

Again

It tells you a lot about somebody

What they play in their room

And that song

Perfectly encapsulated

Me as a human being

The vibe

The lyrics

The materialism

All of it

You know, sometimes, back then
I would walk into people’s rooms

Different people from school

And people who wanted to be friends with me

And I would survey the floor

Some rooms were too messy

Too much stuff

No order

No reasoning

Just mess

I didn’t like that

Some were too clean

Bare floor

The person must have thought--

Oh, I’ll clean up for her

So it’s possible

They might have been interesting people

But I had no way of knowing that

And that’s sad

It really is

Anytime I would walk into a clean room

I just felt like--

Like it was such a missed opportunity

You know?

But when I would walk into a room

And find just the right amount

Of clutter

No trash

No spills

Nothing dirty

Just...clutter

I would get so excited

And then I would listen

To whatever music they had on

And if they didn’t have music on

I would make them put music on

And I would tell them

To choose very wisely

Because, you know, this was going

To make or break them

And sometimes

I would approve of their selection

And sometimes I wouldn’t

But one time

One time

This guy

Put on What A Girl Wants

Without being told to

And let me tell you

That guy

That guy?

He ended up being

The one

The one gay man

I’m still friends with

To this day

So you see

The little things?

They’re important

And even a mess

Can be gorgeous

If you look at it

The right way