I ain't ready...for a crazy little thing called love

Syllable
“I learned the truth at seventeen,” the song warbles, soft, lamenting, as you stare at the ceiling of my room, spread-eagled on my bed. It seems to fit—in the seventeen and four years and counting, you’ve never been a beauty queen, never felt the eyes of a lover linger on your lips.
And so you stare at the ceiling and dream, dream of boys with dreamer’s gazes and poet’s smiles and artist’s hands with a really nice set of pecs, as they bend down to lie down in your bed and whisper the three syllables you so badly want to hear.

Vaccine
From when you were very young, they’ve given you shots for chicken pox. Small pox. Protection against bacteria that would have slain you centuries, or maybe even four decades ago. Later, there were the shots for tuberculosis, for the prevention of breast cancer.
You don’t remember the infant shots, but a phantom twinge echoes in your shoulder in remembrance of the last. You avoid looking at the needle, but from your sister’s whimper it must be at least two inches—maybe more. From that one glance, it seems awfully thick.
A brave little girl, merely three times seven, you scarcely feel anything beyond that first prick, and the immunization is over in a moment.
Fleetingly, you wonder if there’s a vaccine for loneliness.

Aide
It’s when you’re helping your friend bolster the flagging organization, as a somewhat useless aide-de-camp, that you’re hit with the realization.
This isn’t your story. Your role in the universe will always be relegated to The Best Friend, the Joan-Cusack-type Older Sister, the Angsty Misunderstood Daughter, and happy endings, like it or not, will always have to be lived vicariously.
Because you are sidekick, and it’s the heroine, in the end, who gets the boy.

Alarmist
Sometimes, it perplexes you when people say you’re a leader.
You have a tendency to panic, to react immediately, arms flailing about. You get frustrated at incompetence—especially your own--, and during crunch time, your statements have an alarmist tinge.
Deep down, you know you’re more suited as a foot soldier.

Cub
Just before you go to sleep, and moments in between waking and facing the new day, you imagine having a family of your own.
The face, the hair, the build of your husband-to-be varies; his gaze, ardent, is the only thing unchanged.
An infant wrapped in swaddling clothes lies between you. Or is it two, three? It does not matter. You feel a surge of love to this as-of-yet-unborn children whatever the shape of their eyes or the color of their hair or the shade of their skin, and in your mind’s eye the babies are perfect, and more importantly, yours.
And come heaven or hell, mama bear will protect her cubs.