Coy Mistress--

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I don't know who she is...but I can feel the (perceived) thoughts frozen on her face.

The hand-coloring someone did makes her seem melancholy--stuck in a world that doesn't understand.

She's emo circa 60 years ago, before "emo" was even a term. (OED places it as first being used in 1993)

What she's feeling has nothing to do with music, I dare say. Emotional works.

Tom may have just said,

"Janice, give us your best wistful face."

But I don't know Tom or Janice. It's a guess. She (my Janice) makes me think of Sylvia Plath.
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Not the "just about to put my head in the oven" girl we all know and love--but the laughing, fun one at Smith College or visiting Paris as chronicled in her "unabridged journals."

Sylvia was a hell of a journal writer.

So Janice here, stately and strong on a pier--maybe on holiday with Tom. In Spain or Chicago or whatever place they were able to sneak away to...is like Sylvia, a journal writer too.

I bet Tom was NOT the first boy she ever kissed either. I can just tell.

See how all of that is thrown together in my head?

"Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power."

(Andrew Marvell)

~~J