Head turning

It's not that I was lusting after the teenaged girls in the mall last night. Not really. I was just lusting after their clothes. But not in the sense that I wanted to wear those clothes, or even wanted to be able to get away with that look myself. It's just that the goth girls, in the black spiky hair and the tight pink shirts with bats on them and the long velvet jackets with lines of grommets look so...composed, so much like the universe might just be scrambling to rearrange itself around them for their convenience, without the even really having to notice. I found myself thinking that I wanted a woman in her thirties who could carry that off, that beautifully and also that unselfconsciously. Not because thirty sounds safer, or more legal, or anything, but because I find that look around the edges of the eyes that you don't have when you are sixteen is the thing that draws me, even behind the black eyeliner. Part of me imagines I'd drop my little boy off in a safe place and run back quickly, hoping she'd still be there, so I could sit in the food court with a diet soda and look at her quietly and kind of hope she wouldn't notice except sort of maybe I'd wish she would.