where all the kids have robot parts

There are two types of girls in this world: those who are the perfect, timid matriarchs born only for marriage - the bread-and-butter kind of girls who carry family photos of distant cousins in their wallet and will do everything in their power to avoid an argument - the girls who sit crisscross applesauce on their twin-sized bed and daydream about wedding dresses and first kisses and plastic pink dollhouse homes. There are these small-town girls with their quiet smiles and television dreams, and then there are those who are wild.

While the small-town girls are daydreaming about Tupperware parties and joining the PTA, these concrete goddesses are taking off their heels and jumping carelessly into public fountains. They are dancing wildly to live music, whether it be pulsing trance or cafe jazz, and wearing hand-strung popcorn necklaces as crowns. These swinging cafe-au-lait kind of girls belt out karaoke standards without missing a beat and scribble little crumbs of encouragement on bathroom walls - they slip in and our of our world, cart-wheeling and backflipping through life, and the tragedy is that sometimes we only notice their presence when they’re gone. Sometimes they fall into our laps as best friends and curious strangers. Sometimes we are those wild girls.

We are the ones who will always sing, even when nobody’s listening. We are the ones who will never hesitate to ride loop-de-loop roller coasters, no matter how daunting they may seem. We are the ones who will never be afraid to speak our minds, and we will do whatever it takes to change the world. Others may never understand us - the simple girls will stare scornfully, scratching away our encouraging graffiti with a manicured nail, but these shortcomings never seems to faze us - until it comes to the matter of love. When beautiful boys are involved, boys who thrill us and chill us and yet could never begin to comprehend us, the whole world begins to slow.

These boys with their expensive watches and stunning punctuality, they are afraid. They see who we are and what we have, all of our madness wrapped up neatly in lace and tulle, and they realize that they could never tame us. They know that we, with our ever-changing nail polish, would never rear their perfect Oxford child - that we, with our dreams of baking cupcakes for notorious authors, could never settle to be part of a conventional family. In us they see instability and calamity - they fear the fact that we will never submit to their American dream. And so they run. Even those with love in their hearts still run, tumbling towards unwed sweethearts in Lily Pulitzer sweaters. And these silly boys settle down with sleepy girls that we will never understand. And we are left standing barefoot in pubic fountains. Or star-struck on that karaoke stage. Or staring blankly at a bathroom stall with pen in hand. We realize that love has eluded us, tricked us, shattered us with its fickle sense of humor, but maybe we are the ones who have been doing the eluding. Are we wrong in our slam-dancing ways? Have we become too much to handle? Somewhere along the highway of life, have we made a wrong turn and somehow forgotten to change lanes and become simple?

When did love begin to dictate who we are and not the other way around? No matter how lovely or sweet those dashing boys are, sometimes we just have to accept that we are too wild for them - too complicated and untamed. At the end of the day we have to ask ourselves, is it better to be loved or free?

We may be unconventional darlings, or gothic prom queens, or mysterious concrete conquistadors, but we know what we have, and we will always embrace it, no matter the heartache it may bring us. Because we are wild. We are free. And we are not afraid.