[Because why not?]
She's been doing a lot of things alone these days.
She goes to the movies by herself on these little dates.
Not like she pretends a boy is actually taking her.
No, she takes herself.
She buys herself popcorn and asks for extra butter without blinking an eye.
She takes her time deciding which seat is the best in the theater, getting there twenty minutes early to really think this through.
She gets takeout for three and smiles as she tells the hipster waiter that no, she's not expecting company, she's going to eat it all herself.
She sits on her bedroom floor after washing every item of clothing she owns and folds it all, neatly organizing her closet by season like a sane person.
She puts on that music playlist she doesn't admit she has in public, having twenty minute dance parties and singing at the top of her lungs, only pausing to ask the lead singer - who is obviously smiling at her from her recliner as she belts out his melody - how she sounded.
She laughs overdramatically as she answers for him, "Why are you not lead backup singer?"
She tries new things with her hair.
In high school, she wore it long and wavy, just the way the magazines told her the boys liked it.
She may have been grumpy and snappy at the said boys because she had to wake up two hours before school, but at least her hair looked fabulous.
In college, she wore it Short And Sexy, as the tv program told her to do if she wanted to Be Taken Seriously.
Everyone took her seriously, except her.
But now she was playing. Curling it at 11 at night just to see what it would look like with short curls. Seeing what kind of braids she could do with still-semi-short hair. Spending hours on the internet looking at pictures of celebrity haircuts, not to remind herself of how wrong and ugly she was, but to get ideas for herself and decide what she liked just because she liked it.
She made goals for herself for no reason at all.
Going a full week without makeup.
Rewarding herself with chocolate after wearing heels for an hour without kicking them off.
Trying those machines at the gym that the beefy guys always used that terrified her.
Getting up before dawn just to watch the sun come up in the quiet stillness of being alone with the world.
She wasn't Figuring Herself Out like drama queens do in high school.
She wasn't Discovering Herself like the high-on-life kids did in college.
She was befriending herself.
She was loving herself.
She was.
