Iceberg

She walks into the bar, her long hair tied back in twenty-six different braids. Laughing, chatting, leaning over the drinks that keep being sent to her from lone men hoping to catch her eye. While she is percieved as calm and relaxed, her iceberg of emotions extends far beneath the water.

Nervousness floats near the surface, the kind of electrical anxiousness that occurs when you hear footsteps behind you in the last one-hundred meters of the race. The this has to work, there’s no way it won’t type of nervousness. But running through, around and under that electric current is a cloud of elation, the heady feeling of pulling off the impossible. It’s the feeling of a first kiss, or a perfect score. A rushing, wild joy that courses through her body like lightning. She crosses her legs and is amazed at the changes, immediately beset with an overwhelming and directionless gratitude that solidifies the cloud of elation.

At the very bottom of the emotional iceberg is a layer that in many other people would be decades old, shoring up the very foundations of their beings. Hers is new and thin, but it grows steadily every second she spends with her makeup, her scratchy, cheap bra, her high heels and her shaved legs. It’s a layer of satisfaction, of the absence of wrongness. It is her knowing that no matter what she will be comfortable in her own body.

She never found out what powers that be reached into her heart and found her true being, but the water in which the iceberg floats is determination, a vow that she will never have to hide who she is again.