Vanhattan

It’s faelike. Trickery and youth and playful mischief abound. Children in lines dancing and spritely, waiting to beg for candy. Black falls orange and glowing, and the night is pregnant with possibility. I feel lost, wandering but happy. There’s pleasure for me in not knowing what’s coming, but certain something is on its way.

Insignificance, simplicity. I like it that way.

Friends and jobs and the cozy parts of life that are lost to the years, you can dig them up if you know where the X is. But most of the time we forget to mark it.

I follow the stone path, up and down rolling hills of an autumn town, leaves thick and dank and casting monstrous shadows that tickle at the edge of my senses, where they should be scary but this night it’s just quaint. I see a face I know, pale and freckled and beautiful, elfin, glowing in the almost dark and wearing a witch’s pointed hat. She slots in well with the kids, and part of me longs to be like them, to be like her. The confidence and the innocence and kindness, enough to lead and be led in turn.

She tells me I’m not enough. Not brave enough, not daring, not mischievous enough. Not fun enough. I know it already, and she tells me it in pitying friendship, a last-ditch attempt from a too-wise savior, but I continue down my path.

Old school buildings like brick warehouses, manufacturing memories by the bookload. Same after same. It’s comforting and sweet and rotted, like aging yellow pages. Dusty piping.

I’m snatched up by strong hands. I love the feeling of being whipped away, swept from my own agency for a moment, but it’s ringing in my ears not enough. Do I bother to fight it? Is it a fight worth losing? I was comfortable in my journey, some task levitating just beyond my memory’s outstretched fingers on the stone. Comfortable and warm.

In these hands I’m hot and bothered. Agitated, but struck through like electric fire that makes my atoms stand on end.

I let them touch and push and pull, browned burnished gold, and then dance out of their reach. Perhaps this is where I find the childhood I walked past in queues. I love to taunt and tease, and keep the truth of my inadequacies disguised in my own skin, the red of my lips, the curl and break of my hair – gold in its own right – the swell of my breast and curve of my thigh. No one ever sees past the heat, it’s my own safest place to hide.

And I let them burrow deep, feel the air leave my lungs and wonder at the hands that draw it from my throat, wrapped around my neck like a warm winter scarf for the cold walk home. I know it’s coming.

Something always is.

But here, immobile and trapped beneath knees and grips on feathered down blankets, what comes is soft and light. Sugared sticky between my fingers, smeared across my cheek and everywhere else. Like frosting.

I could drown in it. Or better yet, float away on the clouds and clouds of it.

Let the sickly sweet whipped grit bring me home.

I’ve always waited for this kind of ecstasy, even as the other kids waited for their candy.