ghost freckles

I am supposed to be having fun at one of these dreary pubs
with an animal in the name
but I suddenly remember my nine year old self, waiting outside
our old local
trying to do handstands against the brick wall to pass time.
The mini-me phantom fiercely practices until pieces of gravel embed themselves into her burning palms
and she cries silently whilst watching a bleary man smoke an orange blur silhouetted against the darkening sky.
-

‘I’m fine’ I smile, an adult again, trying to scrunch my eyes a little
(apparently a real smile always reaches the eyes).
I do a lot of nodding and laughing,
and I think most of it is appropriate.
Then I drift towards the toilets whilst excusing myself to no-one in particular.
In the solitude of the bathroom I stare into the mirror and notice the greyish freckles peering through my thick make-up, like ghosts.
The mirror is surrounded by panes of frosted glass
from which I wildly avert my gaze
because looking into them feels like being forgotten.
-

There is someone warm in my bed who is vaguely familiar-looking.
He is my age, but his eyelids are fragile like a pensioner’s.
They are like single sheets of tissue paper
and there are noticeable creases in the corners of his eyes.
When he wakes up I wonder if he is going to stagger away clutching his head, or make a crude remark,
but instead he smiles and says ‘I didn’t realise you had freckles’.
-

A little light seeps into the room and in the moment I point out his eye wrinkles.
‘Crow’s feet. They make you look wise’.
He turns softly and tells me that his gran always calls them smile lines,
because she says you get them from smiling a lot.
‘Even though smile lines are here really’ he says as an afterthought, tracing brackets at the corners of his mouth.
-

But a real smile always reaches the eyes.
-
In a quiet moment haunted by the hum of next door’s refrigerator
the boy-man with tissue paper eyelids remembers with sadness,
how aged twelve, whilst sitting alone at lunchtime,
he had fed his tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses to his spectacle case with a definitive snap
and proceeded to squint right through his teenage years.
-

I haven’t attempted a handstand in eleven years,
and he still doesn’t wear glasses.
-

Our dark hair spills together like ink across the pillows
as we lie still, side by side in an crisp double bed;
a white meringue of crumpled sheets.
-

In my head I write a story about a girl who has ghost-freckles and a secret fear of frosted glass,
and a boy with fragile eyelids who has crow’s feet from squinting to fit in,
but who will always let his gran think
that they are from smiling.