Quartet For Two
(Do You Want to Get the Girl?)︎︎︎ C. Sandbatch
︎ Jan 9, 2026
“Dude, four people are involved,”
says someone else.
Standing plain: the real girl
sharpens the scene.
Suddenly attentive to real stakes,
it feels like I’m the one being hunted now.
Still the real girl,
standing where my thought curdles
itself into something solid.
Brightens, suddenly more knowable,
I catch myself watching, slightly misgiven,
soften into innocence. Performative.
No one is doing harm.
My friend names them back:
“one who is only geometry,
the real one, the imagined one,”
as though speaking her reframes
the frame.
Washed-out morning, spared from scrutiny.
Still real, I watch while wanting
to be without; wanting.
Real. I wish she constructed
me, real, and from a voice inside.
Unadorned again. Returning, smaller,
almost nonimagined, spotted.
Angled. “Stand a little closer, please.”
Her frame now looks back at me.
A quartet after all?.
says someone else.
Standing plain: the real girl
sharpens the scene.
Suddenly attentive to real stakes,
it feels like I’m the one being hunted now.
Still the real girl,
standing where my thought curdles
itself into something solid.
Brightens, suddenly more knowable,
I catch myself watching, slightly misgiven,
soften into innocence. Performative.
No one is doing harm.
My friend names them back:
“one who is only geometry,
the real one, the imagined one,”
as though speaking her reframes
the frame.
Washed-out morning, spared from scrutiny.
Still real, I watch while wanting
to be without; wanting.
Real. I wish she constructed
me, real, and from a voice inside.
Unadorned again. Returning, smaller,
almost nonimagined, spotted.
Angled. “Stand a little closer, please.”
Her frame now looks back at me.
A quartet after all?.