planet of hats.

school

Third period, anatomy, a mess. They are diving into histology, and for a million times she has peered through glass lens into the microscopic world, a place so strange and unfamiliar that she is hard-pressed to believe it is part of her, of humanity. Skin, muscles, organ tissue— bits and pieces immortalized under coverslips, held in stasis forever.

Simple cuboidal cells are her favorite. She does not care for the other ones mainly because they are indistinguishable masses of stained purple and pink, striated gunk, too unfocused. Cuboidal cells are easy to find, though. In a fragment of kidney she sees them, tucked into small tight rings, little blobs of cytoplasm frozen in time. The nuclei are dark circles. There are four or five in each ring. She imagines they are friends. Cellular cliques, separated by thin membranes. The thought makes her smile.

Fourth period is history, a systematic breakdown of her country’s past mistakes (the discussions are fiercely unsure; she does not partake in them), and fifth is calculus. They are practicing defining curves at certain points. Tangent slopes. Her fingers flick idly over her calculator and, for a brief moment, she envisions all the functions in the world, multiplied and factored and sliced into descriptions of the most common of things: a ball’s trajectory, the curl of a spiraling silk ribbon, the curve of a female waist. The sweet line of a neck, a path that lovers trace with their wandering mouths. I can graph the arch of your back, she muses, the perk of your lips. The world is really an expression of the rational, after all.

Her bag hangs low, the strap a negative parabola on her shoulder. Neurons firing away, she traipses to sixth and thinks of coin-sized worlds.

always

personal.

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smile

-

On some level she is a mess.

She doesn’t quite know it yet, but her body does. Every time she eats something an ache happens just there, somewhere indistinct and vague yet apparent enough to cause her to skip meals. “Forgot,” she explains to friends. “I forgot to eat.” She walks for what feels like miles, and her feet ache and her legs ache and everything aches, but she does not think to eat. Everything makes her feel vaguely sick.

She cries sometimes, when she thinks no one is looking. She does not sob, or throw hysterics, or weeps. Rather, the tears run pathetically down her cheeks as she stares unblinkingly at the ceiling. Her throat almost always catches, but she suppresses the inevitable sobs.

It hurts, sweetly and bitterly. She tries to capture the feeling.

On some level she is perfectly fine.

She smiles at herself in the mirror, she smiles at the sky through the window. She smiles at couples holding hands, at certain lines of certain songs.

Her friends wonder at the blankness of her gaze sometimes. But she’s quite fine, quite fine. “I’m okay,” she tells friends. “Really.”  

She doesn’t realize it, but her laughter is quieter these days.

-

[unfinished for a reason. teenage angst, just can’t handle it.]

and in all my digressions I think of you

I think sometimes you forget the 

way the mind jumps: mine, from

sea-cliffs, marveling at the

way the rocks jut like so, majestic

against the sky, to softness,

the uncertainties of cotton candy,

the indefinite silhouette

of melted

ice cream.

 -

I think of dolls, of buttons, of

the way pumpernickel rolls off the tongue,

the way grommets sound like something ill,

the way sighs blend, and moans send

shivers down the spine.

-

My mind’s charm is flight and lies

in pretty phrases. But your form recalls

the sea-cliffs,  firm silhouette, and I think

I could paint you. Yet I could paint the

uncertainties of cotton candy,  but not

the stickiness. 

-

(Poems are hard to write. I really should post here more often at any rate.)

the honeymoon period.

There is a honeymoon period.

Somewhere they are not alone. He’s brought her roses; she’s brought him a kiss and a twirl in a cotton candy dress. Cotton— the fabric feels light on her and makes her look five years younger, but the dark long lashes and quirk of mouth indicate something much older than either of them. She looks at him, at his roses tied down with a bright crimson bow and fluffed with light blue tissue paper, and laughs.

The roses are red and heavy with the scent of ripeness, of something beautifully gone to waste. He places them beside her and bows theatrically. “You’re lovely,” she tells him, and bows back. “Lovely.” He smiles and brushes back a curl from her cheek.

The sky is blue and clear and perfect, and together they watch the birds rise and glide across the sun like graceful acrobats.

—

There is a honeymoon period.

Somewhere they are intimately close.

He kisses her finger, draws out a heart on her stomach. “Love,” he whispers, and she smiles, draws him in with her arm. “Love.”  She sighs.

—

There is a honeymoon period.

Somewhere they have not said goodbye. Not yet; she lingers on the doorway, looking back on the straight lines she has tried to erase, tried to hide. He leans back, back into the wall, looking at everywhere but her.

Of loneliness, of distances, of things she could not say— she holds it back. Her sweater is striped, black knit, and her sneakers are worn. She does not think of snapshots in time, of beginnings, of evenings on the river and roses picked— she does not think at all.

He does not watch her leave at all.