On Being A Woman

I cannot always read the letters I have sprawled in black ink on both sides of the cocktail napkin, in small, delicate cramped handwriting. Words spilled over across a seedy bar where I had used the napkin to wipe down the barstool. I spread the napkin out, thumbtack it to my corkboard, Johnnie Walker Red now stained in the upper right hand corner. Must have been the oversight of the man at the bar, the one feeling up the leg of the dark haired girl, the one whom studied at Oxford, spoke four languages, but with a rare genetic mutation, was still rendered a very sloppy drunk. The stain turned the cocktail napkin to the likes of old parchment paper, variant replicas of my thoughts, of myself, living out in the sprawled words beneath the brown stain. 
A bit of my soul printed so permanently into the black ink, an affection, an affliction, a grief, a loss, a love, a need, a desire, a want, a life without an end point, a failing, perhaps, at times, by my very own complications, the way I was, and now the very boldness in who I now am. The committed parts of a woman not learned in a classroom, the permanent adulthood you cross over into once you allow yourself to let go, to be open to words, thoughts, stained napkins, seedy bars, risks and chances. In short, once you allow yourself to just be, without any expectation of life past midnight on a Saturday night, once, you let go of your past forever, finally hitching to a chance at a future. This dark haired girl I will never be, but, maybe I thought, I could learn from her...so I watched her navigate through the night and the seediness of the bar, and Oxford bred gents.