One

Hello my name is Maria. I am the girl who ate lunch
outside with only her boyfriend in high school
and picked at the clichés in the poem he’d written her
only to discover years later they were
the lyrics to a David Gray song—most of my life’s
plagiarized in some way. I walk in New York the way I’ve seen
people do in movies: it’s dark; the music builds; I have somewhere
to be, but not really. The hope of originality broke me and fixed me
all wrong.

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