Rapunzel

She sits by an open window. The rusty screen doesn't stop a winter chilled wind from slipping through. The trees below are holding a golden brown - the color of marshmellows in the campfire right before they burst into flames and turn a charcoal black. This moment is peaceful and delicious. It smells like sweet honey and antiquity, echoing with the sounds of waves as tires speed across wet cement. 

And then the front door slams shut, it's caste iron decoration resonating like the bars of a prison cell. There is only one grey cloud in the clear, cold blue sky, and it bleeds disaster. She is clawing the walls for a way out, but it only succeeds in creating a scratchy throat. As her heart sinks lower into her stomach, she brushes her hair, ripping knots in half with her comb's teeth, and makes her way down the creaking stairs. 

It is a practice she commands with composure and an adolescent grace. Waiting for the day her hair will be long enough to tickle the heads of people passing down below. Her responsibilities are conquered by fairytale dreams., but one day she will be strong enough to hold her burdens like a braid of hair. They will trail behind her and they will be dead useless weight until she decides to cut them loose, but starry eyed wishes of Princes and kisses keep them affectionately attached to her. 

Of Missing

What am I missing when I wake up missing you? My eyes open to a world I don't always recognize and so often I am disoriented, disappointed. The rhythm my life runs to becomes erratic and sloppy. It is distracting. I miss what is happening around me when life's tempo misses a beat and you are my percussionist.

When I say I miss you, I feel it in my throat. It is a cold stone that slides from the back of my tongue and clunks into my chest. I am choking on what I have lost. Isn't that what missing is? Loss? Like when the TV remote has gone missing and you squeeze your hands in between couch cushions in a desperate search for it. You have lost it, even though you always put it in the same place - on top of the pile of books that teeters atop a narrow coffee table. Missing is the unexplainable lose of something. And although you will find another way to turn on your television, you will still wonder where the remote is as you watch bad reality shows and continue to search for it.

I do not know how I lost you and so I go on missing you. And its mornings like these - when a cold draft seeps in through my old windows, but it is the sun's bright rays that wake me - when I miss you most. I dig in between my cushions, hoping I'll find you in my misplaced memories, but it is all loose change. Something useful, but not what I was looking for, and not what I need.

Of A Pending Future

She has big plans that she scribbles into notebooks, filling pages with bursting dreams she can't seem to make a reality out of. Perhaps if she tears them up to be carried away by a summer breeze, or folds them into airplanes she can shoot out her window. Maybe then these doodles would skedaddle towards a future. Maybe then they could root themselves to something solid and blossom into action. 

Until then, she fidgets with uncertainty. Restless for something to happen, but all this stagnation leaves her still. She is the fallen leaf that leaves no ripples, the flower that can not find the sun. 

The Palm and the Daisy

Tap 

tap, 

goes the palm against the window. 

His leaves wide like a hand outstretched toward the sun, 

bathing in the sunflower rays of a hot velvet day. 

Lazy.

Dazy. 

The palm slaps against the window.

Swaying to and fro. 

Seeing iridescent spots 

then takes a glance below.

Hazy.

Daisy.

Her lemon center points towards the sky.

Oh to be as tall as a palm.

Her banana bitter eye

Stares up at this giant, green.

She sits below the window

Shivering in his shade

His palm slaps against the window

To the Daisy, no attention is paid.

Jessica Goes to the Aquarium

Jessica hops off the bus, her feet touching the pavement in unison. Her long golden hair whips and twists in front of her face. Her hands soon become sticky from the salty air and her fingers get tangled in her locks as she tries to push them from her eyes. The ocean rubbles in the background, a heavy wind whistles through the parking lot and somehow sand has already sneaked inside Jessica's pink and brown sneakers. She has been eagerly awaiting this class trip to the Coney Island Aquarium and she bounces on the balls of her feet as her teacher pairs the children up to be buddies.

Jessica would go to the aquarium with her father every Sunday afternoon. They would wake up early and stop at their favorite bakery for warm fresh bagels and cream cheese which they would eat in the car as they drove down bumpy Brooklyn streets. She would sit perched upon his broad shoulders while they walked past the tropical fish and menacing looking sharks. This trip would be different than the ones she went on with her father. Her buddy's hand did not hold hers with a careful security so she wouldn't get lost in the crowd. Instead, it hung limp, and a little sweaty, within her own palm. Despite her father's absence, Jessica was still excited to walk through the maze of bright rainbow colored fish and into the tunnel that opened up to beluga whales bobbing in their tanks on the other end.

Jessica's teacher gently pushed all her students into two lines, each child's shoulders grazing their buddy's as they began to walk towards the aquarium entrance. Inside Jessica and her classmates were amazed by all the colors swimming past them. Neon blues and greens darted in and out of bright orange coral. Jessica felt like she had just landed on another planet. A planet dictated by color where a smile was indicated by the flash of your bright fins.

The class twisted and turned through dark carpeted pathways lined with fish tanks. Parrot fish blew bubbles against the clear glass while eels looked out suspiciously from their coral shelters. Jessica let go of her buddy's hand to watch white jellyfish dance lazily with one another up a cylinder tank. She watched the tentacles drag behind their balloon bodies, like ribbon tails trailing in a sluggish wind.

Jessica looked behind her to see where her class was congregating, but there was no one in the room except for a short, tubby looking man with thick framed glasses and a mother holding her baby next to the starfish tank. She tried to quickly walk around the exhibit, optimistic that she would see her buddy as she turned a corner, but the rooms were dark and had multiple doorways and soon she had gotten herself more lost than she had been just standing near the jellyfish tank. Her heart started to race and she began to nibble at her short fingernails. She felt awkward and peculiar just standing in the middle of the room, as if everyone could tell she was lost and the feeling made her legs move forward. Jessica had no place to go and no recollection of where she had been. Things looked different from her father's shoulders and here on the ground she couldn't make out which way was which.

She walked past the seals darting back and forth in their tank and wandered past tanks with tiny fish with no eyes and big fish with eyes popping off their thin faces. Jessica reached the penguins, she knew this was near the end of the exhibit, but she still was alone with no sweaty palm to hold. She sat on an artificial rock and watched the peculiar birds glide so gracefully underwater and wobble so unnaturally on the rocks above. Eventually someone would come, Jessica was sure she would feel a tap on her shoulder and look up to see her teacher's tensely pursed lips hovering above her. But minutes went by and she was still alone and beginning to doubt her confidence in her teacher and classmates. "What if they didn't notice I was gone?" Jessica wondered, and a pang of hurt vibrated in her heart.

It was one thing to have someone lose you, but to have someone forget you was different. It was sadder and lonelier. Being forgotten is a reminder of how your importance is fluid and changes volume depending on the person carrying it. Jessica knew her liquid significance filled her father to the top of his head from his big hairy toes. That was why she could sit perched upon his shoulders, like a thrown, her position dictated worth. That's why she wasn't allowed to sit atop her teachers shoulders, because she wasn't allowed to have favorites and because then her teacher would have to let all her students sit on her shoulders and balancing twenty children on your shoulders isn't part of the job description.

"Jessica!"

Jessica quickly peeled her cheek from the glass tank wall and snapped her neck in the direction of a deep voice. As if her father had heard her thoughts, there he was quickly walking down the hall with two giant outstretched arms. Jessica jumped off the cold rock and leaped into her father's warm arms. She cried. Not because she was afraid or sad, not even so much because of her happy relief. She cried because he cried. Her father was so worried. She could tell by the crack in his voice when he called her name. She cried because she didn't like to see him upset. She was sensitive to his emotions as if they were transplanted from his heart to hers.

Her father held her face between his enormous calloused hands and looked at her at first with worried eyes. Slowly, they began to get smaller as a smile crept upon her father's face. "You must have been very determined to get me down here," her father said, smiling even wider than before. Jessica nodded her head and smiled with a mouth only half filled with teeth, her straw colored hair matted to her wet cheeks. Her father stood up and in one quick motion swept Jessica up in the air and onto his shoulders. As they left the aquarium, Jessica could smell the sweet ocean air which had become warmer since this morning's arrival. There, on top of her father's shoulders, Jessica let the June sun dry her eyes. It wasn't a Sunday, but it felt just the same.

A Weed

I want to write something beautiful. I want it to drip with liquid inspiration that glitters in the sun as it falls from the tips of my fingers. I want the frost covering my window panes to melt away and expose a green covered world. I imagine the blue sky hovering closely above my head and tiny periwinkle colored flowers grazing my toes as I walk barefoot through their neighborhood. Emerald leaves of grass cover wet brown earth. There is no broken glass here to cut through my callouses. There are no broken hearts here to remind me of another time. My nature grows over the memories of uglier surroundings. A weed is beautiful here. It suffocates my rationality, but I have no will to pluck it by its roots. I don't want to evict this weed like some common criminal. He is an exceptional law-breaker, possessing a way with its unspoken words. What good does it do to exile him from my world? I know it will come back, despite my best efforts. This weed will push through the dirt once more, stronger than before and more tightly clung to my earth's floor. The frost will come and go, but the weed will continue to grow. I am not a fool by allowing it to stay, I simply want my world to be green.

The Beginning

So it took me a long time to decide whether or not I wanted to start another one of these. How much do I feel like sharing? I'm usually all about the concealing. But in the end I want to write and I have been slacking, my fingers no longer crack from the brittle clenches my pen was held between. I miss this mild discomfort, so it seems, and so I am starting this to kick my ass back into the literary. Although most likely it will be mundane and amateur, I hope every once and a while my words will sparkle with perception.