You wouldn’t know it was me. A botch hair job and a black ball cap covering my face insure all photographs of me were useless. I didn’t want to be remembered. It’s only been two years yet the three boys on the spring-seesaw are nothing like themselves. Yet it’s been two years and I can still feel the sting of sunburn on my cheekbones, on the tip of my nose.
I doubt they cared. My brother and cousin both spilling with the image of pre-teen and teenage passiveness. We were all hiding. Why wouldn’t we? Though while I hid behind my clothes hoping to one day forget the person I was existed. My two ‘elders,’ one only nine months older and the other almost 5 years, were so content with themselves that they hid under uninterested faces and a pair of sunglasses.
It made sense to wear sunglasses, so I wouldn’t fault my older brother there, but jeans were a mistake that 110 degree temperatures wouldn’t forgive. My cousin and I were a bit more practical with shorts stopping at our knees. But instead of the swim trunks that my cousin wore that billowed in the wind and my mother’s yelling; I was left with shirts that turned to second layer of skin as my body grew to try and suffocate me inside.
Being twelve made everything seem like the most important part of my life, but some things were so important that I shoved them down till it settled in the bottom of my stomach till the waves of anxiety swept it up again every time someone said my name. Swirling around, piles of the self-loathing that came with an identity crisis and lies you tell hoping to believe them yourself, the stormy waves of the ocean at our back door. The dark grey blue water that looked like the color of my mothers camera. The same camera the captured the child that stole my identity.
In a world where the land was an ocean every baby was given a rock. This was them. And every time they learned something new they would get another rock. And as they got older most the children used these rocks to make themselves a little island. The more they learned and the more they grew, then the larger they could make their island. Jane didn’t seem to get the memo. When Jane was only just born and in the nursery of a hospital she heard another baby crying and wailing. Jane was hurt by the sounds of the baby in pain so she have them her first rock, to make them happy. This continued on as Jane grew, she kept learning and growing, but she kept giving away all her rocks. “I don’t need them,” she said. “I want other people to be happy.” Jane was nearly 13 years old and she was beginning to notice something was wrong. None of the other kids she knew swam in the water like she did, with her head sometimes being swept under. They all had islands made of their little rocks and some had even used more rocks to build walls on their island. Jane wanted to have an island to. So in the dead of night Jane swam over to her best friends island. He was much older than Jane and he had given him many rocks to make him happy. “He won’t miss one little rock,” she thought certainly as she yanked one of rocks out of his wall and swam away. When she got back to her normal patch of sea she used this one little rock as the first step of her island. For a few months after that, nobody saw Jane. She was so busy learning and growing that she had no time for other people. But in those months Jane made herself her own little island. It was not big like other peoples, but it was her own island. It was her home.
I knew a girl in bumble-bee rain boots
Who loved to blow bubbles with her gum
And hide poison behind smiles
She was the girl who was always ready
For everything but herself
I knew a girl with blonde hair
That grew like hell
And blew out in waved like the ocean
She had eyes blue and green
To shame the turtle charm she wore around her neck
I knew she always hated endings
Still she couldn’t wait for her story to end
And girl that could never look away
She started dying when she was only eight
Though she’d never let a story end like this
I knew a boy who was born sick
Eight years old when he died to open his eyes
And it took him four years to learn about this girl
She died for him to live
Yet she stole the childhood promised to him
I knew a girl and I know a boy
Who loved chewing gum in class
And sip soda like a life-force
She was a he and will never be ready
For anything but himself
There's an order to the buzzing electrons that float through the clouds of their atoms. Racing together in the elements that create the compounds that build unto the universe and unto us.
There is a a logic to notation of numbers spread out and labeled like a gridlocked graveyard.
1s, 2s: The first level of energy, starting our count as 1. 2p, 3s, 3p, 4s: Going up now letting the balls of matter change and grow. More powerful S to 2, P to 4, racing upwards like a Willy Wonka elevator. 3d, 4p, 5s, 4d, 5p, 6s: Up and up and up, the elements are more complex we've moved from hydrogen to gold and there to Actinium. Again we go S to 2, P to 4, D to 10. 4f, 5d, 6p, 7s, 5f, 6d, and 7p. The highest level has been reached, no element stretches beyond this.
Even Lawrencium, number 103, doesn't surpass our sorting system. We've gone up S to 2, P to 4, D to 10, F to 14. There is a grace in the subshells upgrading the power, the energy levels bouncing around.
Some unstable, some not.
But the entire world is sorted down in to the notation's made up rules like Aufbau, Hund, and Pauli.
We can break down all the worlds and the starts, everything we've ever seen broken down into 1s, 2s, 2p, 3s, 3p, 4s, 3d, 4p, 5s, 4d, 5p, 6s, 4f, 5d, 6p, 7s, 5f, 6d, and 7p. In theses lines you can stars colliding and dying, supernovas expanding and consuming.
You can see the lines that cover your lover's hand or the apple you had this morning a breakfast.
You can see blood on your head when you were only just born. Everything can be seen through the lens of subshells sorted from clouds.
With everything boiled down to spectroscopic notation.
The grass is cold on her arms. Salt and ice pressed into the crook of her arm as the weeds bit at her like horseflies. The grass is fading in the fall light. Red-brown leaves cast shadows that matched the cold grey of her eyes. The eyes, the eyes, the eyes, that was her job to forget. Blue and bland; it’s the faded jeans her father always wore. Who is she. She had the blue eyes. Who is she. She was was everything. Everything to the girl laid out on grass her hands folded. Resting in a casket. At least they match now. Brown and red hair always casting a contrast till they’re both laid out like the dead. The crushed velvet itching like grass till their arms are red. She had red hair. No, no, no. It’s her job to forget. But still, she had a gleam in her eyes that chased away tears. Fingers that turned blue at the end just to match those blue eyes she has. Poor circulation to blame. Who else had blue hands during the summer. She did. Now all the color was drained from her world. The grass, they sky, the fallen purse of the lips she had. Eyelashes that fell across lids; the same way the brittle grass was crushed beneath her arms.
Today I watched bodies move like water drops racing down a window. Blue skin naked in their intimate dance, but not sexual. The black cords of their hair pieces falling over them like a shield. Today I watched something vulnerable and beautiful. Bodies contorted into one another create life in the space between their skin. Today I watched "Hymne aux fleurs qui passent."
There was a calmness in their motions that I can’t understand. A steadiness to the tension in their muscles as they bent towards one another. I’ve never trusted someone to move with me, as they did. This was a performance with two dancers, but only one performer. together they were a unit that displayed a intimacy unlike what I’ve seen before. Not to seem like I’m overstating, let me clarify by saying that I haven’t seen a lot of intimacy in my life. But the way these two moved together didn’t seem human.
They were more than two people in body paint. They were electrons floating in the cloud with no path or destination. They were strands of hair that looked like they were tangled, but were actually just twisted together. I’ve always tried to be hyper aware of my self and others, to break down who was who and why they did what. But there was an organicness to this performance that left me lost for intention or purpose. And yet, it was one of the most breath-taking things I’ve ever seen.
