Rhythm is an ache in my heart.
i’m having a holding my hands in my hands kind of day. It’s written all over me in the golden-white uppercase letters of those Smirnoff caps that i keep finding all over campus. i’ve bolded it by covering the pulse in my wrist with an oversized, lacy scrunchie instead of tying it in and around my curls.
The Sun is burnt, melting sand dripping into my shoulders. i lift my blistered feet from the chilled ebb and flow of a jetted fountain.
A torn scrap of yellow poster board paper slips from the pages of The Faraway Nearby, one of the books i’ve been underlining in and clinging to for life. It levitates in the trapped, Sunshine water. My knees bite at the surface when i bend over to lift it from the fountain, smooth the crinkled, saturated paper, and tuck it folded into my back pocket. i slide a deep blue ring band off of my index finger to hold my place and ease the novel closed around it.
i’ve felt like a runaway. A pastel blend of not having any idea what i’m doing and being softly sure that somewhere sometime somebody will come looking for me. By the end of every day i’m either really, really blind, or really, really deaf.
i ease through the molten pavement sidewalks like they are deserted but televised. Walking lightly as if barefeet lace me closer to Earth and shout mantras that face fears running similar frequencies to that of an itch but limiting like broken bones. Fears like tendencies built up behind my lungs that deter me from things like tearing paper, drawing on people, climbing tall things, and saying how i really feel.
My ears are ringing. The lingering truth of the song that has been loud in my head. i tug light blue earbuds from where the cords connect, and wind them into uneven circles around my hand.
Shakily sleep-deprived, i’ve lived in broken time to the cadence of bitter dark-black coffee. My eyelids are softly magnetic, and my arms fall into each other and lift like they’re covered in bruises. That’s not to say that the lust of seventy degrees and palm trees hasn’t been a crescendo behind my eyes. i keep doing impossible things.
i’m walking and thinking. Walking beneath- between- palm trees. Thinking about how maybe the reason i feel kind of empty-hearted is that i’ve forgotten which side of me holds my heart. i’ve lost my heart in my own body. If asked where my heart was, I’d bring my left hand across my chest. If i were speaking about something passionately, i’d bring my hands up to the right side of me. And now that i’m aware that my heartbeat is on the left, i am an imbalance. Really, really hollow. My gait leaks to the left.
i don’t notice when my ears stop ringing.
The pull of the here and now is the rhythm sunken into my thumb tracing circles over my palm as i walk. The bells from the clocktower are a sound like the pace of opening and closing my fists over and over. i am seeing the people see me. The space-time collisions around me turn pedestrians’ eyes into kaleidoscopes, the lean of bikers into syrupy tidal motions that are large and small in the same movement.
i feel these people and how they bend the world deeply. But i will never know them.
I know that people can love without feeling anything from their shoulders down when places and other people are honest and messy.
i pull myself up onto a shifting rock wall and match my steps to the places where my bare feet align with the lean of the stones. The ground ahead is coated in short, yellow leaves that hold most of their weight by the stems and come to quick, ruffled points. i squint my eyes at the leaves that could be covering any kind of chance to fall through the Earth forever. i step off the wall. My heart jumps when my ankles don’t sink.
This is the train of thought that leads me to forget to take the floral sunglasses off when i shrink against the wall and lower myself down onto the mudflat carpets of my dorm with my right hand crossed over my heart. This is the rhythm that bends and tilts the world. This is the walking rhythm.
i breathe to answer the ache.
PLUTO BLOOMING 