Blue-Red-Black
i
I am very particular about many things. More often than not, I am preoccupied with refining one aspect of my personhood or another. The scales balance finely and, like all things, require constant maintenance: the brand of pen that I use, its fineness, how it balances in my hand. A hat trick, the ball falling clean into your hand in a juggle. The fiber I put on my skin, how I scorn at any tag that reads anything less than 100% cotton, how all my pieces have to be timeless, polished, and closer to perfection than it has reason to be.
Control: I revel in predictability and routine, planners & making sure everything in my life is perfected down to its atoms. Of course, it will never be enough, the ouroboros of time & the mistakes of life, how I'm sent right back to the journey of finding the perfect cut on the perfect tee every time I feel the slightest hint of dissatisfaction. I find myself working in absolutes, draping myself in its sheer blackness, marveling as it spills onto the pure ivory paper--the perfect black.
ii
I bear every interruption to my routine as a catastrophic event. Trauma catches up to you in ways you may never expect, and to me, that is the fear that enters my body when the clock ticks 5 minutes past seven and my mother isn't home. She must have died, or have abandoned me at last, I find myself thinking. I treat arrival times and departure times like a tightrope, every ticking moment like sand falling into the bottom of an hourglass. I arrive 10 minutes early at all times and ask people to expect me to be late if I plan to show up on time. No matter which angle I look at it, I see discourse as this opaque shadow that tails behind me and threatens to eat me whole if I pause for even a second: neither I nor Orpheus can afford to look behind us.
I arrange my pens again, the same pattern: blue-black-red. As it should be.
iii
If I had to describe her in words, I'd say she is the spring storm, how the ocean shimmers at sunset, the way leaves flutter in small vortices in the autumn, the welcoming reprieve of snow. I think of her more alive than the rose and more often as a series of actions. How her presence is frequently a small miracle of time. I can not predict what she would bring today the way I cannot predict the weather but strangely, I don't find myself minding it. Of course I mourn the time that she is gone and grow impatient, feet tapping on the ground, while I wait for her to turn the corner (10 past the designated time and I'm starting to wonder how each second feels like a grain of sand when she is not near. I contemplate the fragility of the hourglass.), but I find myself pushing plans back to find one more minute with her. I let the tightrope loosen under me and pray I do not fall.
She allows me my metaphors. She allows me to express my affection for her in the comforting way the moon rises each night and the quiet constancy of water brushing past stone. I think of her as sea glass. Poetry is always breaking my heart and I find it a little easier to breathe now that I understand the insurmountable feeling they weave into words. It is simple: I look to her and suddenly wonder about the bird at the diamond mountain & how it wears the mountain down with its fragile beak within a single day of eternity. How I still would promise her all of eternity if she wants it. I want to sit with her and let the days pass by through the window and love her quietly.
If I had to describe her in words, I'd say she is the relief that leaves as an exhale when I allow myself grace; in images, the way the sun lovingly bounces off the honey amber of her eyes and how the grace in it makes all things in the world still for a moment; in actions, how I would write for her again and again like I was born to do so.