Time

I must master The Siblings of Time:

Brother One, The Day, rushes forth in a fury of wind, and I brace myself until he passes.  But I must run into that wind and fear not of his tackling blow; I must take on the day intrepidly.

Brother Two is The Hours who slings knives at me from across the room. I count them furiously, enduring slashes -- I must pluck them by the blade from mid-air.

I am in love with the Sister of Time.  I cover and coddle her, begging her never to leave me. But there is a limit to the span of our tryst - I must, I will, plant the seed of my immortal memory within her consciousness.

Melt My Heart to Stone

(Reflection #5: Create a literary work related to your anatomy dissection experience.)

Melt My Heart to Stone

That smell—- I will never forget that smell. It was more of a stench than a smell… They say that olfaction is one of the most powerful cues for memory:

This stench—- I will never forget this stench. With my scientific impressions of life’s great circle, from the zygotic dust of conception to the microcosmic ashes of carrion-feeding bacteria, I know better than to equate this stench with death. In a philosophical sense, it is quite the opposite—- it is actually the smell of reincarnation. It is clinical and scientific; it is the smell of knowledge being born from the womb of expired time. It is pungent like the scholarly sweat seeping into the meticulous detail of intelligent design. It is putrid—- overwhelmingly so. It is a stench strong enough to elicit humility in its students, like a divine warning not to fly too close to the sun of discovery. This is what a rite of passage smells like.

Death is, in fact, nowhere to be found in this situation. The spirit has fled from these bodies, although it has left plenty of its mortal secrets behind. While there is absence behind these glassy eyes that are frozen at half-mast, there is a certain familiarity about the expressionless features, in the mosaic of musculature around the mouth, the eternal remnants of a smile. I vaguely recall these features from beneath my own skin, yet my recollection is hazy as they are shrouded from my voyeuristic view.

This body is teaching me what it truly means to be human, what unites the two of us as brethren in the same race. It is providing me with understanding of the human as a machine, contextualizing my existence within the grand scheme of our species, of life—- smoothing the emotional and perhaps naïve edges of my worldly views and leaving me feeling infinitesimal.

 I find myself unconsciously holding his hand, unsure who is truly comforting whom. It seems most natural, most compassionate, most human. He is telling me his singular tale in the braille text of moles and freckles that decorate his skin in specific patterns as it is peeled back from his personal take on our common inventory of muscle and sinew. I am moved by his memoir and inspired to intrepidity, scalpel positioned for my opening gambit.

The more layers I remove, the more he reveals to me our similarities, that which is common between all of us. When skin is detached from bone, we are all different interpretations of the same vision—- we are all of the same flesh, our diverse personalities dictating the exact course of our veins. We are marionettes, our digits and joints still able to move at the mercy of a skillful puppeteer when our spirit has gone.

I extend his arm outward, moving it away from his trunk to reveal the closet of electrical wire hidden underneath. I gasp, overcome with appreciation for the logic behind this arrangement of nerves, strung ever so delicately to fulfill their purpose like the strings on a harp. Holding his heart in my hands, my awe in the face of such brilliant architecture for the sake of function overrides my sense of its significance as a battery on borrowed energy.

Perhaps I need this change in perspective to continue. The fact that the face is covered is no longer a condition of my gall.

I conceptualize the brain as a mystery, turning it over and back again between my palms and almost forgetting that every groove of fibrous grey represents the path for a thousand fragments of memory. I am holding a cedar box of old photographs, contemplating the specific pattern of marbling in the wood as if the rings on this tree do not tell a story that dates back to before my time.

I do not flinch at the chew of blade through the Achilles tendon as if I no longer dread the pain of such an injury, nor the mythological implications behind it. I am unfazed by the cling of paper-thin skin upon eyelid and the crack of jaw separated from skull.

Then, slicing unexpectedly deep to peel fingernail and bone from the thick cushion that underlies fingerprint, I wince, feeling his spirit within me as I sympathize through the vicarious experience of imaginary pain. I have finally severed the lifeline, his connection to the tangible world. I have finally separated this being from his true identity.

He is truly dead, yet the stench has been long forgotten.

generations

My older brother was born in the early 80’s like the guy who invented Facebook. The tail end of the grunge era, we’ll call this Generation Y.

I was born in the later part of the mid eighties. My generation gave Facebook our stamp of approval – we dictated how to use the internet; we are responsible for the evolution of cellular phones. So we’re Generation Z.

My little brother was born in 1990. He probably doesn’t even remember a time without the internet or cell phones. His generation invented texting while driving and cyber bullying and all-caps abbreviations of the English language.

At a loss for letters, how about we call him Generation Question Mark.

the modern feminist

Young girls are socio-culturally predestined to rebel. So oppressed and protected and restricted -- by the time we blossom as young women and learn the infinite power of femininity, we cannot wait to exercise it, to abuse it even. Once out from under the thumb of naivety, we are hungry for liberation.

And we all rebel, every last one of us. We like the feeling of our breasts as currency. It's no big deal to us at all -- our breasts are perhaps our freedom, and we've been waiting to be free for much longer than we've been aware of independence's existence.

Yet perhaps this too is part of society's plot to turn us into the ideal counterpart for male, according to his preferences and alleged convenience. We are led to believe that our breasts, uninhibited from the naked eye, are the key to our salvation from the global tradition of misogyny; but thinking back, now on the other side of the teenage trenches, I suppose we did not expose them because we were intoxicated and frivolous, we did it because we thought we could control him. We were not free at all, but grasping at straws of power to no avail. It was all a false inkling -- we were playing right in to society's clutches all along, figuratively lying on our backs without even knowing it. Perhaps we will always be prisoners of man's desire, so innately tickled by the audacity of his roving eye. Maybe we were indeed made secondary and for that very purpose.

The sociocultural weaponry is revealed in the fact that I even have to wonder.

the verduous hours - pt3 (the end)

Green was the color of the creek on that late Saturday afternoon. Her ring caught the last rays of pure sunlight before the grand decent to the horizon would take place, and the glowing stone threw green back up at her. She followed behind him, suddenly feeling the freedom to openly sample his scent from the back of his tee-shirt, instead of stealing breaths of it when he was turned away and she could walk past him just close enough to inhale briefly.

There were so many secrets that she locked away in her heart, and that day, it was a relief to be open about at least one thing. It had gone without saying that she would never tell her family —- especially her brothers -— of the special times that she and Sebastian shared, even as the months passed and she would see him more and more. Somehow it was more special that way, as they would take long walks and she would hang on every word he said.

She never questioned his enjoyment of her company —- everyone needed someone to talk to; even when she was alone, she still had the trees. She supposed that there would have to come a day when she would tell everyone about the love that she had found; eventually she and Sebastian would get married and be together forever, and then everyone would know. But until then, until she was no longer twelve, and he was no longer twenty-three, she would tell no one, suffering an unruly heart in song —- perhaps the wind would take her secret far away to another world where everyone would celebrate the beautiful feeling she now knew so vividly…

That time of the year meant earlier sunsets and a chilly breeze. She still had not cut her hair since the summer, and when the wind stirred at her locks, they grazed the exposed skin of his arm just below his sleeve. She wished she were touching him with a part of her that she could feel, but she was far too afraid that he might disappear if she reached for him. She would await his touch all the time, gasping when it occurred; when he commanded a kiss from her with his large hand cupping the entire side of her face, or perhaps his forceful grip on her wrists to reel her in to his chest.

That was how it happened that day, an urgent grip on her wrists that brought her near to him as they approached the rim of the creek. Kissing was her second nature by then —- they had kissed exactly nine times; she kept diligent count on a special page hidden within the scratch of her journal.

Anyone who read that journal would surely know that this love had changed her. She no longer wore ponytails, but allowed her waves of thick, dark hair to fly free. She no longer turned up her lip at dresses on Sunday morning; she looked forward to them, just in case Sebastian’s family sat in the same pew as hers in church. With careful maneuvering past her brothers, she would land in the seat beside him. She would extend her pinky finger when no one was looking, the one that wore his ring, and she would graze the half moon of her fingernail along the stitching of his wrinkled khaki trousers, pressing just hard enough for him to know that she was thinking about him.

He had touched her in exactly ten different ways —- not just to kiss her, but on his way to his full height from where he sat beside her, his palm would press against her bare knee so that he may catch his balance. Her heart would stop then, as her stomach erupted with all of these feelings that she could not possibly describe.

That day, down by the creek, was the eleventh.

His hands, clasping her forearms so that her palms were together in the prayer position, released their grip and came to rest heavily on her shoulders. He looked down into her eyes, icy grey sparkling as his stare changed angles slightly and the sun rushed in.

“Do you love me?” he asked her, and so many different ways of saying yes flashed through her head that she was left speechless and nodding.


“Something to drink, Miss?” the stewardess asked with a plastic smile that momentarily dispelled the haunted feelings residing deep within Abigail’s stomach.

She nodded her head, forming the first few syllables of “Bloody Mary” before remembering the large knot at her waist and changing her mind to an ice water.

Green was her love for him. Every last drop of it.


But he never did say it back. As many times as he asked her, as he pleaded with her to tell him how she felt about him just one more time, he never would say it back.

Even at twelve, she could understand. He had explained it to her once, when he was telling her all about his family. He was an only child because his mother could not have any more children. He felt as if his father hated him, and Abigail tried to understand what he could mean by that, but she found it too hard to believe that anyone could hate their child, and moreso how anyone could hate Sebastian. It was that notion, the notion that he perhaps did not know what love was, that made her want to tell him every chance she got. She tried to find a different way to explain to him that she would love him forever, so that maybe he would actually believe it this time, but she was oftentimes caught off guard and left tongue-tied when he demanded answers so hastily. Most of the time, she could only speak those three words, while the true poetry lingering behind them was reserved for her diary.

His hands on her shoulders created a great pressure that urged her to sit down right away. She nearly lost her balance, landing with a slight flailing of her legs to keep an upright position. Just when she was sure that she was securely on her seat, his full weight was upon her chest and she was on her back, swimming in his sent as if that green tee-shirt from the first day they’d met was draped over her face.

She would have to change her tally to twelve, thirteen, fourteen -- that day she would loose count. She could only see the green of the grass all around her, then the tan on his broad chest like they were still standing, except this time, she could feel the full mass of his body pressing her into the earth like nature pushing a raindrop to the ground.


Green… green, green, green. She held tightly to that memory, screwing her eyes shut and feeling her heart catching up with the humming whir of the airplane. She was leaving green behind now, she could relax.


“Relax,” he ordered, when she tried to squirm.

His tone had lost the gentle chords of their usual, one-sided conversation.

Green… she tried to take a deep breath but found that she could not catch enough air in her lungs. The green began to bleed from her world, making way for the blackness that existed without consciousness.

She gasped somewhere within the grips of that memory, within the paralysis of REM sleep approaching, and the nightmare of that day.

That was the day when it all changed.


Red.

Red was the water in the creek when he told her to wade out until she was up to her waist. She stood there, her back to him and shivering, her arms crossed over her chest. She felt him enter the creek behind her, stirring the water in ripples that concentrically branched in her direction.

There was suddenly a heavy scrap of fabric over her left shoulder—her navy blue tee-shirt that had been stained dark with water. She silently accepted it from his outstretched hand, dragging the soggy cotton over her head to conceal the parts of her skin that were pale and untouched by the sun.

Her khaki shorts were still in the tall grass, along with the denim jacket she had worn every fall since she was eight. It had once belonged to Jameson, but as she grew older, she filled out so that the shoulders no longer drooped towards her elbows.

She turned to face him, but in the rapidly setting sun, she could not see the color of his eyes anymore. Or perhaps, this time, she did not look.

He left her at the top of the hill.

Turning to her under the indigo sky, he asked her if she still loved him. She did not search for the words this time because she was rendered silent, placing her steps as carefully as she did her eyes, but he beseeched her this time, the dire urgency erecting the veins along his sun burnt neck. Her glance towards his face was very fleeting, and she did not flinch from his grip on her wrists.

Then she swore that she did; that she always would.

Green was the color of silence —- the secret that he had made her keep as he wrapped her pinky finger in his and made her promise. His thick lips, swollen from her teeth clenching against the sharpness of his hips, had covered the green stone as if to seal the tomb of their private moment —- but even the moisture of his kiss could not put out the fire he had left burning inside of her.

Running for her back porch that day, she had sworn that she hated him, when all she could see was red. But it wouldn’t take long for her to give up and go back to loving him, because she would soon realize that she couldn’t even tell the difference.


Green… green… she did not want to remember that color again. She did not want to remember the color of his eyes, or the color of his baked skin along the blades of his shoulders. She did not want to remember his birthday kiss, how he had held her wrists as if she were his. She did not want to remember how she had stolen pieces of his scent -- she did not want to remember any of it, so she threw her face into her pillow like his hand over her mouth.

He returned the next day, sitting on her front porch between Jameson and Walker with his bare feet dangling over the edge. She was so bold as to greet him, and his glance in her direction was so fleeting, she barely caught his grey in the glare of the sun. But she could smell him from where she was standing, and that was almost enough to make her love him again… even if he were to burry her again, down by the creek.

She waited for him at the top of the hill when the sun was just setting -- just when the green was beginning to show before nighttime took over once again -- but he did not come.

He never came again.


Green —- like the limes the following summer, like sitting on the back porch as the fireflies became excited from the citrus juice and the peels Sebastian and her brothers threw out into the yard.

But he did not look in her direction.


Then there was a time when she could no longer be his. The memory of the creek, the memory of his eyes that was fading fast was all too much to bear. As Walker and Jameson prepared to leave for the university in the city, Sebastian moved on too. He no longer came by her family’s farm, so she lingered where his shirt had been on the first day she had ever really seen the color green. It had been far too long since her companion had turned to her, had pulled her in close for a kiss… it was too late. It was all over. It had slipped from her before she could even realize.

She did not know for sure, but she got the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that he no longer wanted her to be his. And when the aching was more than she could bear, when the secrets had eaten away at her insides and she could no longer find the lump in her throat to cry even though tears were trickling down her face all the time, she gazed at the green stone on her pinky and knew that she had to get it off.

She had tugged and tugged, sobbing in futility where she crouched, hidden, in the corner of her father’s shed. The multitude of motley metal tools threw golden shapes across her face as they bandied softly, suspended on hooks from the ceiling and twirling to catch the sun through the window. She had tugged and tugged, but that ring would not come off, even as her fingers and palms grew moist with sweat and the tears swiped from her cheeks.

The ring had indeed been too small, but every glimpse of grey that her memory returned to her was a reminder of the urgency she had felt so many years back.

She ran the two miles to his family’s farm —- over the hill and through the acres of cornfields behind his house. With a great stroke of her father’s axe, and a great cry, like all of her love for him draining out in a song with just one note, she left the ring along with her pinky and red -- like the creek -- upon his back porch, rapping her other hand on the glass window of the door to catch his eye on the other side. Then she turned to leave, strolling east for her family’s farm.

But his hands were suddenly upon her shoulders and he was holding her back. She did not struggle when he pulled her to the ground and clutched her left hand to his chest. He was screaming, but she could not hear what he was saying.

Then the green gave way to black.

Then they sent her away to where it was all white, but she still thought of him every day.


Now, in Chicago, it was grey, so she thought of him all the time.

She eventually did emerge from that all-white place, but she never fully returned to where the green stretched on as far as the eye could see. It remained silent in her world; she remained indoors, turning away from the cornfield behind her house to watch the few forgotten husks in the corner of the kitchen turn crispy brown and then crumble into dust. Then she was suddenly slapped with the vigorous winds of the distant city, and the university life blanketed all memories of her life before; the snow in Chicago would cover everything.

She still thought back to him and those days by the creek, but she never spoke of them.

Then there was that day when her memories seeped back into her lungs as if she were taking a breath for the first time -— and she gasped as she saw those same grey eyes locking upon hers.

That was the beginning of her monochromatic life with Rick.

She wondered what she must have looked like to the world by then; surely she was a far cry from that sun-burnt twelve year old. She was practical now. She was an environmental journalist —- a practical career -- and she ironed her hair every morning in order to maintain the composure of the city ladies that were quintessential, walking, talking women’s bathroom symbols. She wore her designer sunglasses and sensibly stylish trench coats, and a prosthetic left pinky finger, consequent of what she now referred to as a tragic tractor accident from her youth.
And Rick was the perfect man —- although she constantly searched for her lost love in the charcoal that rimmed his pale irises… Rick was perfect. He was seven years her senior and balding; he had a sagging stomach, although he was very thin, and a nerdy chortle that grit her teeth every time.
He had long sweeping lashes that suggested the kindness he expressed in his constant doting. They had an apartment on the waterfront, and he had asked her to marry him, then he planted his seed within her as if beseeching her to love him, because she could no longer find the words she once longed to say twenty-three years before.

She never said them anymore. She never would again.

She still longed for green, and she prayed every day that this baby would have Sebastian’s grey eyes so as to preserve a piece of him, a piece of the creek. But when she got off the plane in Chicago, that grey belonged to Rick, with his awkward smile and rosy cheeks. Rick was the one she did not have to wait for. He suffocated her with his love as if he feared that she would leave. And he sent his watch -- a black, plastic Timex —- with her whenever she would go, like he was sending her a piece of himself, pleading with her not to forget him.

But she found him hard to remember because he had nothing to do with green.

She was perpetually only half-listening to Rick; her mind was still down by the creek as it had been ever since the day she counted twelve… thirteen… fourteen…

Rick was there in baggage claim with a bouquet of daisies propped in his hands. Drained of all energy after such arduous travel through time and space, she could not even balk at his attire. She could not balk at his pale skin that had never seen the sun; she could not even balk at his clingy nature when she wanted to be free. She could only follow with the guidance of his fingers around her wrist, listless, as she maneuvered her belly that was eight months swollen with what she prayed would be Sebastian’s successor, even if by Rick’s blood. When Rick glanced back at her over his shoulder, his eyes were wide with the compulsively intrusive fear that she would one day be gone.

And maybe one day she would be. She longed to be where it was green -- she needed to go there to clear her head.

He fingered her bare wrist for his watch, and she fished it from her handbag, pinching the strap between her first two fingers and dropping it into his palms apathetically.

One day she would leave this watch with her wrist upon his doorstep, and the monochromatic would finally burst open with color as she took off towards the place she loved and hated all at the same time.

Green was the color of her past, and she had not forsaken those promises she had made so long ago. The promises… green was the color of forever.

One day she would be his again.

the verduous hours - pt2

Green was the rest of that summer, and always would be.

It was the shade of the limes that puckered her mouth while she sucked the juice from the nectar, keeping one ear on him across the porch where he sat between her brothers, their legs dangling over the edge. Jenny and Diana hung nearby, giggling between themselves as surely their eyes were fixed upon the Adonis who had become a normal fixture at their house by then. But while her sisters waited patiently for the opportunity to corner him at the front door when he jogged to their farm every morning, Abigail said nothing.

She was like a specter underfoot—she would catch the icy grey in his stare and it would charge something in her chest that made her heart pump out of rhythm. She would want to run away in those times, not sure whether his eyes indicated that he was the Devil or an angel.

Until she could figure it out, she would keep her distance.


Green was the long walks she would take, alone, so that she may sing to the trees, caressing the tall grass as she began to long for grey. She would think about him, about the perfume that radiated naturally from his skin, and she would begin to wonder what it would mean if she were to speak to him.

Green was the waters of the creek that ran between the loess hills to the west. They were aqua, the shade she imagined the ocean to be. She had never seen the ocean, but she was confident that it took on the same color as the sky when the storms were about to come.

Green was still on her mind when he was suddenly behind her, eclipsing the late afternoon sun that was beginning to turn neon pink. She turned to him in a startled silence, wondering how long he had been standing there and if he had been listening to her thinking about him. Her heart stammered in her chest as she began to back away from him, but he approached her at the same time, and the icy grey of his eyes melted to reflect her face in the pales of his irises.

He smiled, and made a comment on the sky.

She turned briefly to look up at the cobalt expanse behind her -— somewhere, trapped there in his stare, she had missed the sun as it began to bleed that hot pink to stain the few stitches of clouds nearby.

He sat down at the edge of the trickling waters, his towering height folding into a position that was somehow less threatening. His eyes traced her bare legs until they reached the hem of her denim shorts, then they skipped the rest, sweeping upwards to her face. She was staring at him intently, not realizing that her mouth was agape, although she had not said anything.

He had smirked at her, so dumbstruck in his presence. In hindsight, her admiration must have been obvious. He must have seen that she was so mesmerized, because he had patted the overgrown grass beside him, inviting her to sit.

She cautiously sank down to the seat on his left, and there was not much space between them. At this level, she had an easier line of sight to his face, and she followed the movement of his thick lips as he started to talk about how he had always loved to watched sunsets -— he shared one of her deepest passions.

He continued to talk, explaining his childhood, sometimes using words that she didn’t even understand. Yet, in the spirit of this older man confiding in her —- even her brothers did not find her to be worthy of their confidence —- she dared not ask any questions, lest he realize that she was just a kid and take back all of these secrets that she believed he told to no one else.


But that was ages ago. That day no longer had meaning; she tried to convince herself of this as she stared straight ahead, not daring to look beyond the glass of the window, lest the memories return with a vengeance…
But no matter what she did, she could not make them go away.


Green was like the pastures she had never seen before, as they ventured farther beyond the hill at the edge of her family’s farm than she had gone before. They were inseparable by then -- she would sometimes meet him on top of that hill, just so that her brothers would not see him and hog his attention to themselves. Sebastian understood how precious their time spent together had become —- she was sure he felt it too —- and Abigail knew that it was love, this new feeling that gave new meaning to her chorus amongst the trees.

She came to miss him, even when he sat across the back porch from her, catching her attention with his eyes for a slice of lime. Their fingers would graze as she would pass him the slippery wedge, pale green citrus dripping down her palm. He would stuff this wedge down the neck of his beer bottle, and she would watch the juice drip down and spread throughout the pale amber ale like a cloud of smoke.
She would save the next wedge for her lips, the bright green peel concealing her teeth and gums as she sucked in a symphony of trickling juice down her chin and throat. He would watch her just as intently as she watched him in those moments, those grey eyes clouding over and entranced.


He became a constant fixture during those long strolls she formerly took with just nature and the wind. There came a time when the trees longed for her song again, but she was too distracted by the sound of his voice floating down from above her to sing.

Green was the color of new fields she had never even known were there. Green was the two of them venturing off alone. Green was the invisible stain of lime as the summer was left in their trail, but their hands remained clasped together when they were out of sight.


But green would soon become something ugly, now that she could watch all of it on a reel of film from her past.


Sebastian had a lot of green shirts —- mostly tee shirts, but also the button down he wore to church that first time:

It was him and his mother and father, and they approached as Jameson and Walker hopped out of the flatbed, leaving Abigail to fend for herself. She paid little attention to their conversation as she struggled over the rim of the trunk, but she could feel those grey eyes on her back. Sebastian's shirt was like the color of spearmint that day, and there were far more wrinkles ironed in to it than had been ironed out. Noticing her distress, he approached, that spearmint growing larger in her peripheral vision, and he extended his hand to her.

That had been one of the first times they had ever touched.


Green was the wrapping paper on the gift that he must have wrapped himself, showing up late and unexpected to her twelfth birthday party. He joined her brothers towards the back of the kitchen while Jenny and Diana were fussing over the cake they had spent all afternoon baking. Her mother and father and a few neighbors were milling all through the kitchen and living room, but she sat at the head of the kitchen table, silently patient, and she caught his stare. He smiled at her.

He gave her the present later —- it was small enough to fit in his back pocket all through dinner and the opening of her other gifts. While Jenny and Diana bickered about how to tackle the chores in the kitchen; while Jameson and Walker were temporarily distracted in the shed with their father; while her mother took the baby upstairs for bed, Sebastian excused himself under the pretense of heading home.

He waited for her just on the other side of the hill, and she ran as fast as she could across the cornfields to meet him. The sky was bright pink with dusk, and she hoped the others would miss her shadow splashing across the fields and out of sight behind the house.

She saw only his shadow at first, and his broad shoulders.

When she arrived at the bottom of the hill, her eyes surely danced at the sight of his surprisingly light eyes against his dark features, framed with the halo of the sunset. He offered her the little green box with dented corners from an evening cooped up in his jeans.

“Happy Birthday,” he smiled, and her young heart felt strange, pattering out of synch and stealing her breath.

Perhaps that was the moment —- when she could not see green at all because the sunset cast shadows over everything except the lightness of his eyes -— she fell in love with him.

Maybe her love for him had nothing to do with green at all.


She peeled back the wrapping paper -— glittering green -— with the utmost care, wanting him to see that she folded it then stuck it into the pocket of her shorts. She held the little cardboard box in her hands for a moment, her breath catching in her throat as she wondered if he was asking her to marry him. Raising her eyes to his, she detected a discomfort there that she had never seen. She thought to question it, but he encouraged her to continue with an impatiently eager smile.

“I wasn’t sure if… it’s the right size… but… I saw it… and I thought that… maybe you would like it…” he stammered, then settled on smiling at her, hands jammed in his pockets.

At this mild explanation, she opened the lid to see what was inside, and all was revealed with a gust of wind that bandied her raven waves of hair in every direction, although the showmanship may have all been in her imagination.

It was green, the stone that sat so complacently in a silver setting. She was awestruck to silence, not having the heart to agree with him on the fact that it was indeed too small. Even as her hair whipped over her face, freed from her perpetual ponytail somehow during her sprint to meet him, she was focused solely on the silver ring that finally slipped over the pinky finger of her left hand. She stared at it for a long time, almost forgetting that he was even there, although she was thinking about him the whole time.

“It’s okay if you hate it… I just thought that it would look nice on your little hand,” he finally conceded with a charming shrug.

Her eyebrow furrowed at the thought that she had somehow expressed displeasure without meaning to. She felt the panicked urge to assure him that she adored his gift as much as she adored him —- for as long as she wore his ring, she would be his. She stared up into his eyes and she promised, in her speechless gaze, that she wanted to be his forever. She searched her mind, combing through the pages of encyclopedia stored up there, for the right words to say, something that did not make her sound so dumb, so childish, as she feared she did when in his presence. She searched for the perfect piece of gratitude that she could offer, like a thank-you card, and she spoke before she could run her words past her brain.

“I love you, Sebastian,” she said, clapping her hands over her mouth almost instantly, but it was too late.


He had flinched, having been startled by the first confidently definitive statement to ever come out of her mouth in his presence. She was not sure if she had wanted to take it back at the time; she had searched his eyes for any indication that she had been wrong to express herself so candidly, then, realizing her futility, she held her breath and tried to decipher his reaction.

Without warning, he was upon her, his head dipped low as her gripped both of her wrists in one hand and tugged her close. His mouth fell against hers, causing her hazel eyes to go wide and take in the fireworks of pink and orange and a tiny rim of green exploding in the western corner of the sky behind him. She nearly gasped against the slimy sensation of his tongue, realizing that the concept of kissing him had previously been far too much of a fantasy for her to have prepared herself for it in any real kind of way. His pillowy lips that hung like a pout were enveloping her own, and the shadow of facial hair along his chin and jaw was sandpaper against her soft cheeks. Her hands were losing their feeling with his grip, which tightened with the intensity of his squirming tongue, but she did not try to free them from his fist because his fist was the only thing that stopped her from collapsing over her weak knees.

When he pulled back from her, the sky was just indigo. She swore upon the first star she spotted that night that she would be his forever.


Green was the bittersweet bite of that first love, because with that first gamble, she should have known that her heart was forever at risk of being broken.

Green was exactly how he broke her heart.

the verduous hours - pt1

Green was not just the color of home. Green was everything.

There were plenty of shades to choose from, with the monotonous hum-whir of the commercial airplane beneath her feet; the center of the spectrum had been poured in neat little squares all over the landscape. Each shade had a different meaning, as if Bird’s-Eye Iowa was a photo album of her past based solely on the memories of frolicking with nature as her backyard.

Yes. Green was the color of home.

But it was more than that:

Green was church every Sunday since she could remember. It was the white slip she wore under a layer of tulle, then the stiff cotton of a periwinkle dress on Easter. It was the same families —- they all referred to one another as neighbor, although all of their houses were separated by several acres of farmland.

In the summertime, her parents would sit in the cab of her father’s beloved pick-up truck, and her two older sisters would sit with their baby brother in the backseat. She would climb into the flatbed with her two older brothers, settling within the canyon between two pairs of broad shoulders that jostled her as the truck galloped over the dirt roads leading to town.

The town was at the center of everything, and the different patches of farmland lined the dirt-veins that branched out from City Hall. Everyone attended the Lutheran church that was adjacent —- Green was the same Sunday faces that she recognized since she had a memory; and the Sunday-morning versions of the youth-filled faces she saw every day of the week in school.

Green was the color of the fields in the periphery of her scenic bike-ride to school every morning. And in the afternoons, on her way home, she would abandon her bicycle at the edge of road and take off through those fields of leaning grass. Green was the stalks of the dandelions that covered the hill at the furthest edge of her family’s farm. It was the husks in the cornfields that were her backyard -— at dinner time, she would sit on a stool in the corner of the kitchen with her sisters, and they would peel these husks away to brown in crispy, straw-like piles on the floor.

She loved to peel corn like she loved peeling the rogue rubber cement from her hands after hours spent pasting collages all over her personal corner of the bedroom she shared with her sisters. She used mostly pictures from the discarded magazines that piled up in the garage: images of flowers and trees, some pilfered from the out-dated encyclopedia set on the top shelf in the study.

Green was her favorite color. She spent most of her time immersed in it, even during the winter when it may have deigned to lightly snow. It was mint green then; it tasted mint green, and she made mint green snow angels right beside her back porch.

Green was her sanctuary, whether she was playing outdoor games and trying to keep up with her brothers, wandering the loess hills just beyond her family’s property, or exploring the creeks even further into the horizon from her back porch… And green was in the sunset too -— she had spent plenty of her days watching the sun fall from the sky at its ever-lax pace. With perfect timing, perhaps when the first fireflies decided to glow, she could find the rainbow that haloed the neon fireball to the west. Just at the edges, where the night’s indigo with its many stars began to creep upon the dissipating day, there was the faint rim of green, then the brilliant pinks and oranges that would bleed away with the sun until tomorrow.

Yes. Green was everything. Every memory she had, every good and every bad, could be found within the patches that were beginning to disappear under the cover of white clouds, like winter making an early appearance.

She turned away from the window, her breath leaving a circle of steam near where her lips had been. She was leaving it all behind again, but even so, green would always be green. There were some pieces she would never be able to escape.


What about the color of his tee shirt from the first time she had met him?

It had been a dark, rich green -— like the forest. She had first seen it hanging limply from the fence that outlined her mother’s garden. She had mistaken it for a rag, with its many rips and the darkened sweat stains. Pieces of twisted metal from that old, rusty fence seemed to have punctured even more holes in the cotton that was worn to its most weary.

She approached, cautious. She did not recognize this tee-shirt as belonging to one of her brothers.

“Abigail!”

Her mother’s voice came sharp from the back porch.

But she did not turn back. She looked forward, towards the collection of voices connected to no entity, but buried within the many rows of corn behind her house.

It had to have been late in the summer because the field had been a behemoth wall. At age eleven, she could be completely concealed within the stalks that rose beyond even her father’s height.

Her older brother Walker was the first to appear; he came bursting from between a row of stalks now disrupted, and leaves of green husk flew upwards in his wake. He was shirtless, his skin baked golden from all summer spent outside. Eighteen years of age at the time, that was the last summer she could remember him with long hair. The unruly curls pasted themselves to his forehead with sweat adhesive, interrupting the flawless amber of his bright eyes in thick, dark locks.

Jameson was seventeen, and he had the same curly hair in a raven brown that bordered dangerously on black, but he had their mother’s hazel eyes -— amber with a green marbling. He was right upon Walker’s heels from the field, shirtless and drenched in sweat; there were smears of dirt across his shoulder blades that had become stripes of mud.

“Abby!” he shouted when he spotted her standing beside the fence with one hand on its tattered metal.

She was startled by the sudden attention, and her smile in his direction was fleeting before she returned her gaze to the green tee shirt that was emitting a scent she could not seem to place, even after all of her play amongst nature’s many flora.

She knew every tree and flower that God had ever had the mercy to bestow upon the earth —- she was sure of it at eleven years old. Some of the encyclopedias in her father’s study only contained half of their pages by then, as diligently as she had ripped the others out for her artwork. She could have been a perfumer from how many different colored roses and daisies and lilies and carnations and violets she had sampled from her mother’s garden alone… but none of them smelled like this.

And just as her innocent fingers greedily gripped the gauzy fabric so that she may press this garment to her face for a real assessment of the rich green that was surely the source of that glorious scent, there was suddenly a shadow settling over her own so that the two were joined as one.

Her hands came up empty, and she spun around, jamming them behind her back and guilty.

He was not green. In fact, the sun had rendered him such a dark shade of gold, she immediately knew it was not one of her brothers who was suddenly just inches in front of her. He blocked the sun from her view, but she could not think far enough to search for it behind his pillaring figure. Slowly, she adjusted her line of sight so that she may see what was above the center of this broad chest blocking everything else.

The second telltale factor separating him from anyone that could have possibly been an extension of her family, from anyone she could have possibly ever seen before in her life, was a pair of the clearest grey eyes. Up until that point, she did not even know that eyes came in that color, and swore that he must have been someone very special. Surely his eyes were the color of diamonds, but she did not know -— she had never really seen one.

She felt small in his presence. But it was not just his towering stature making her feel this way; it was his large stare.

She cowered inside herself, inching backwards towards the fence as his arm extended towards her in a shelf of sinuous flesh. And just when something was about to happen, as her heart pounded in anticipation of his skin making contact with her own; just as she realized that the scent she was looking to place could not be found in nature because it was the scent of a man; her brother’s voice startled her.
“Abby, this is Sebastian,” Jameson provided, already working his white tee-shirt from the inside-out ball of cotton that had been discarded a few feet before the wall of corn.

That shelf of taught muscle was no longer obstructing her view, but a large hand was extended towards her face. She stared at it for a moment as Jameson was explaining something in the background: “college…” “father has a farm… two miles west…” “family business…” it was all just white noise.

His eyes were so startling in his face… like wintertime must have looked like in places where it really snowed. They were so cold compared to his warm complexion, and the dark mop of curls atop his head that were even more unruly than her brothers’.

Abigail said nothing, suddenly feeling cold in the shade between the three boys before her. They exchanged words that echoed when falling down to her ears, the same jovial banter that she was used to hearing when it was only Walker and Jameson and she was just tagging along. And then they were gone; she watched Sebastian’s tanned back disappear behind the side of the house, dirt streaked across his shoulder blades like angel’s wings.

“Abigail!” her mother shouted again, but this time there was only sheer exasperation in her tone.

She turned and ran towards the back porch, where her sisters looked out at her from behind her mother’s shoulders. Finding her place on a stool between them in the kitchen, she peeled husks from the cylindrical mosaics of yellow tiles that felt smooth and pebbled in the palm of her hand. And while Jenny and Diana discussed another year in high school, impending as the air grew crisp to make way for fall, Abigail surreptitiously brought a strip of husk to her face, inhaling deeply but inaudibly, to see if perhaps she could find his scent on the moist inside of the leaf.

twenty five years old

I am a baby, fraught with terror and distress. Bewildered, wide-eyed, slack-jawed -- I am learning to self-soothe.

I am hungry, thus hysterical. I am tired, but cannot articulate my malaise. I am frustrated, unable to differentiate need from id.

I am unsure how to communicate my desperation for connection. I am comforted by familiarity in this ever-novel world. My hands know only to reach.

I am helpless, but I am determined to grow strong -- to hold my head up, to sit, to stand, to walk, to run.

"Slapstick or Lonesome No More!"

Steady now
under the weight of decay
Don't let the debris keep you down!
Come back to the light,
the spring where the sun stays
lingering in the foyer, tentative
then smoothly sliding coat from shoulders
headed back to the bar.
Remember your voice on high
appreciate the volume, the mass, the frequency
Let it break glass
Leave a trail of shards.

Chin up,
a silent moment to mourn wasted time
is still wasted time -
Perfection knows not to be born
on its own.