I don't mean as in how you present your physical self. You dress quite nicely, better than me by any standards. I've never seen you looking unpresentable. What I mean by "frumpy" is your deplorable attitude--it's a frump of the mind, you see, and a much harder frump to fix.
Each day you come wading in through your grief. Once again, you didn't get enough sleep. Once again, you've fallen prey to some deadly form of a head cold. Once again, you're feeling "overwhelmed." You adorn yourself with the most pious exhaustion, a martyr to the realm of upstanding high school students.I tell you now, tired eyes are only becoming when paired with a genuine smile.
Everyone you meet must know of your sorrows. You pass each peer, each teacher, jiggling your upturned had for donations of sympathy, constant affirmation, and hand outs in exchange for your trade: your craft of weaving intricate, tangled tales of pity and woe. "I'm not used to this," "I don't want to put that burden on my parents," "It's all because my sister..." You have yet to grow out of your egocentricity. Every avenue of conversation leads back to that upturned hat.
Your own desires come first, and you don't hesitate to make them known. You are slow to come, bitter to stay, and quick to leave. The only time you seem to come alive is when you must make a vice around what you want, a Venus Flytrap snapping with its death grip only when necessary. Control gives you strength, the power to bend others to your will. To take it away is to pull the springs from a wind up toy.
Yes, you are indeed presentable from the outside. If we were, however, able to pull back the thick, velvet curtain of what appears and catch even a glance of what actually is, we would see you sliding into your desk each day, a toddler aroused too soon after its nap, still wrapped in wrinkled pijamas, chewing on its baby blanket, whiny and garbled. In a word, frumpy.
