YOLO

The girls I teach whose hormone-greasy hair frames their faces communicate in cryptic phrases and cut-off sentences and the girls I teach with their eagle-claw nails and slug-plump lips have no idea what a sentence is or a paragraph is

 

and the girls with their acrostic passwords and frozen faces they speak a language I do not understand not because I don’t know it but because they twist syllables roll them with their tongues pin them under stud earrings throw them into the witches’ cauldron of their bags

 

and at the bottom of these bags there live dangling earrings and loose change and broken lipsticks and names of boys they’ve forgotten and one of the girls keeps saying YOLO and I ask YELLOW, and she says YOLO so I ask what it means

 

and it can mean anything because the girls live inside their phones and often on another planet so the word may be alien unknown untranslatable and not even a word but a magic spell because I’ve seen these girls smile wipe tears laugh frown all at once and they’ve taught me that life is what life is

 

and no matter the tense past and present and future are actually all the same because like these girls the girl in me is also was and will be and one day the girls grow up and walk out of the classroom in a row they’ve turned into grown-ups or simply women who were once girls

 

and they’re still girls at heart and they rummage and rummage in their bags for some clue or a scrap from the past and then they find that Post-it note, moth-sallow, faded yellow, glueless, shapeless and on it the mystery word YOLO followed by equals by You Only followed by Live followed by Once

 

and the girls have to sit down have to find their head have to pull themselves and everything together because YOLO now sounds like a word so old that the girls will look at their hands and yellowing fingers and nails and know exactly but also have no idea what that means.​​

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