Unmellow yellow

Here’s what happens when you die:

You float back through the doorway of whatever room you’ve floated out of. (Bathroom, kitchen. Try to choose wisely.) That’s right; as soon as you escape the trappings of your corporeal existence, it boomerangs you back in. That’s momentum at work for you. Ergo, you re-enter, still floating a bit, and the first thing you see is His Holiness waiting for you, and it’s shock-inducing, like the parent not likely to show up at the airport.

That’s the role He plays. “Well, look at you,” he says. It’s a tough, tight embrace. “Just look at you, kid.”

My own dad held me like this once. In the twelve months prior, I had lost 50 pounds and stopped talking to almost everyone. Him especially. He still never calls. But my job remained swell. I was paying my mortgage. Living with my boyfriend. He gripped me in his taught farmer’s arms. Hugging dad is saying oh God how we miss Mom oh God how weak we are oh God how awful the days and then it stops. Shrug it off. We are pretty strong.

God hugs me like Dad. Why wouldn’t he? God says, “Ah, kid…”

And it’s a cosmic joke. Look how far you’ve come! All the while, I have been – like everyone else – suspended upon the point of humiliation. Enumerate my sins. Scrape my skeleton dry. Put me through the wash cycle on a kind of torturous synesthesia: white light blinding, every syllable I’ve every uttered now exploding in my ear. But he only rocks and forth a little, and in his simplicitly, I find peace and shame. The combination, equally weighted, is so unlikely that the heart slows perilously. The mind dulls. Dead. Dead. Dead.

This is just what I’ve heard.

Shadow

Observe this pair of Steve Madden ballet flats with some of the shape and the color cracked out. Size Whatever. Loved to Death.

Observe briefly and move on. These are someone else’s shoes, after all.

Their story is an American narrative, though. You rise up through the arcs of those feet gone away and go even further away with them, into some other girl’s light little life. Someone younger? Most likely, anymore. Someone stronger? Always likely. How hard does she slam her car doors (in enthusiasm), how perfectly medium-voiced her phone conversations, how unthinking the conclusions to every work night and weekend.

“Too many dumb people!”

“Too many margaritas!”

Brunch was amazing. That movie was better than thought. Coffee, coffee is good, you know. My bank account: what. More serious things, too. Where is he going with this, what do I want out of life in this city? Parents age quicker than Petri dishes on fast-forward.

If I can give one last huff and puff of my jealousy, it’s that she has dreams that feel like blankets and remembers them with some frequency.

She is wearing these things in the dead of winter.

Bittersweet

Sometimes a person walks into a Starbucks or out of a grocery store into a parking lot and for a moment you suspend them in the gelatin of an unlikely scenario. You fantasize that this bright-eyed man in his clean pea coat is actually miserable and alone, or that this girl in big boots has no one to call, no one to kiss. But they never sit down in a car or at a table alone.

Everybody wins, for the most part. It’s like a multiple choice final exam that the high school teachers, ridiculously, let us “correct in class.” Question 1, the answer was D. Huh, says some girl. I thought if you said ‘I love you’ first… The class just nods impatiently, ready for the next freebie. The next question is about how to have fun going out to dinner a lot. Question 10 was “All of the above” (people you thought you should sleep with, but didn’t, and probably should have). No arguments from anyone.

Everybody makes their way out on their own, straight to the arms of someone else. And then they live there. Not inside the person, but perched atop, a cat on the window sill. That’s why love is sunshine, you know. In songs and jokes.

I am turning the pages like a speed reader but the story problem will never summarize. There are if/then statements. There are thermodynamics graphs that may be thrown in just to obfuscate the problem. (Was Chart B necessary to come to the solution of this equation? Remember, they actually used to ask these things.) And I don’t want to skip to the answer key, because I always wanted to win. They always said I was smart. They never said I was or could become happy.

And this is the individual you ended up with, poor person of mine. Your only hopes for happiness are when I make those rare, conscious efforts to be cat-like.

Brick Red

This must be unravelled. Is the Little Red Riding Hood Wolf the same villain as the Three Little Pigs Wolf?

Examine the criminal record(s). Impersonation and attempted murder. Trespassing and property damage. You could say the victims are too different, but I have my doubts. A naive young girl bears certain uncanny similarities to pink, squealing piggies.

So say they’re the same. What’s the chronology? Does it even matter?

Doesn’t the wolf die in each of these stories?

Does it even matter?

Real villains never die. We know this.

Cotton Candy

On an otherwise completely manic-depressive early January evening, he emerges through the bit of fog. Under the bridge. Under the expressway. Under his long, tall tower of puffy pink and cerulean blue. The cotton candy man.

There are other dozen roses and teddy bear men, other watermelons in the back of a truck men, other “art vendors” peddling living room prints along bus routes. There’s so much market in a city of millions. But there is, presumably, only one tamale guy, who appears arbitrarily at hipster bars (a drunken dream!). And there is only one cotton candy man, bearing his load proudly on the slim traffic median.

At this point in my thoughts, you wait for the concession. How there really are, must be, more. How anyone’s good idea must be a few people’s good idea. And maybe it’s not a good idea at all to sell cotton candy under the expressway in the dead of winter.

You want me to say he’s not magical.

But I will temper my habits. He is magical! He has appeared through my windshield like a beacon of whimsy, a weird and wonderful purchase possibility. He is only full of warmth, and surely he must do well for himself, boarding the safe, luminous bus at midnight with a bursting pocketful of five dollar bills.

Emotions and thinking, like food and exercise, should be switched up occasionally for the health of their vessel.

Oh Jen, you can’t eat the same thing every day. You can’t feel the same way every night.

Orchid

The spaces it creates are ineffable.

But try. That’s the other philosophical armrest of American yoga. The “yang” to the hollow, silent surrender you otherwise desire is sweaty exertion. Only the strongest figurative language can twist your spine deeper, lengthen you forward.

The things they say—

I am pulling your right arm forward and drawing your left leg back

Your body is in between two panes of glass

Your body is a bobby pin and no light or air can get through—

are cruel and wonderful.

Neon Carrot

 On the train, your food belongs to everyone. Like your body and soul on the train, it is a sickly sponge to all train elements: to everything from dirt, to ground-up other food, to people’s laughs and coughs. Even their smiles, if ever shown, would be an ingredient in what you breathe, touch, and consume. It would be a layer on top of your eyeballs.

“Food and beverage are prohibited on the CTA.” Still, after cradling the grease-splattered bag above the scissor snip, snip, snip of the turnstile, after holding it inside your coat as the wind of winter and other trains rushed by you on the platform, after all of this and so much more (for let’s not even fathom if you went out of your way, sought other buses and trains to make this purchase and win this hunt). After all of this… you have hot and ready food on your lap.

The styrofoam cracks its back and you take out the chicken in the critical eye of the 2 o’clock sun. Mmm, mmm. You can make some noise. Everyone else is, in their own way. Even the rigid college students in clean pea coats, armor-like iPods, and (sometimes) novels are (sometimes) turning pages and spewing traces of Spoon and making tight little sounds with the backs of their throats that maybe, medically speaking, they should be told about. Fleeting thought.

There’s corn on the cob. You eat it. This puts you in a discrete population of people who have eaten corn on the cob on the train. Stop, don’t reflect. This ensures your membership into a more elite membership of people who have done this without mirth or irony. Leave those college students behind.

There aren’t enough napkins in the world for what you’re doing. And you’ve gone too far to stop, not that you would. You are sharing your feast with us. Sooner than you know it, all but box and bones will sit just inside you, like any purse or backpack or grocery bag shifted around and re-packed halfway through a trip for more personal space, a new empty hand. But smell, substance, everything, will stagnate in this train car. This train car is an historical archive. You are a scratch-and-sniff photo album, hungry mama.

I watch you do all this, so much as I can without you beating me up. I am meek and unliving, and I compare myself to you. Tell me what you were thinking about, where you’re going. What’s for dinner, why you love it.

Inch Worm

Especially in the springtime, he would change his clothes and kids and their parents alike would remark upon the color he was wearing. A really good, devout parent would also supply the reason why. I remember white, purple, and green, though probably not in that order. When he wore that green, my sister and I would snicker it out in our pew because the outfit finally fit the voice.

High-pitched and nasally, he would perform the required musical solos Sunday after Sunday: “Through-him-with-him-innnnnhimmmmm…”

“In the un-i-ty of the Holy Spiiiiir-iiiit—”

Kermit the Frog.

Not just in the color of his clothes, but the squint behind his glasses.

His face.

“All glory and honor is yours, Almighty Father—”

The piano banged in, deathly destroyer of his a capella as he backed off meekly on the last and most critical words of the blessing of the host.

“Forever… and ever…”

Singing was a bad part of church, because no one there was any good at it, and the blessing of the host was bad too, because that part of the hour always lasted too long. Too much preparation to corral the twitchy parishioners forward only to make them sit back down again for Minutes 53 - 60, which were mostly just more weak and unenthusiastic singing. The changing vestments were a bad part of church, because you were supposed to understand from CCD classes. Perhaps flash cards were in order there. And finally, church was the bad part of church. It ruined Sunday, grinding the day to a halt, making people tired again, making “soup and sandwich” lunch in the kitchen, my mother’s Kraft and white bread microwaved grilled cheeses, canned tomato soup and chili, a weak and chilly home you just couldn’t microwave up.

All my sister and I had were our jokes, our mockery of others, like Kermit the Frog. People who loved us, Laura…

Mahogany

It’s the kind of word you could fall asleep in, with the mm and ahh. And all the syllables make it seem sophisticated, like a second cousin emigrated back in time to Henry James’ Europe. The name’s on the tip of your tongue but not quite there when you hear “Ebony and Ivory” come on the radio.

It’s the kind of word you will fall asleep in, in your final hour.

It’s calm and surrender, a dumb numb, a fun thing to play in. No one’s mental picture of this word is altogether vivid. When pressed, one conjures up a chest of drawers, which is something like the Platonic ideal of furniture. With a name like Mahogany, it’s got to be better than birch, or even cedar or oak, or the faux wood from Ikea, or even the cherry-stained cabinets that made your 1200 square-foot condominium a Must Buy.

The artisan inset around the stereo system in your 2011 Acura ZDX: it’s Mahogany.

Swish the pinot in your glass. It’s Mahogany.

After you’ve had your bit of fun — after you’ve tried to roll around in it, and stubbed your toe on its corner — the onset of mental depression is almost immediate. Why do we have so many words we never use or really understand? Catalog words, dictionary words… we each know so few, and what we do know, we’re always in danger of “showing off.” The Mahogany chest of drawers leaned lightly upon by your literary invention of a European cousin would total up to a picture still less haughty than you, little gumshoe, using a word like “perspicacity” in dinner convo.

Give this one up.