I.
I lift my eyelids.
plipliplip.
The rain invites me to play.
Her cold fingers curl around the doorframe,
"Come on, come sing again! Sing, just like you used to!"
She burbles gleefully.
"Come on, old friend.
We used to be ballerinas, whirling and laughing.
We used to be one
one and the same."
Her fingertips inch through my solid oak door.
I frown and shove the door closed
throw down the lock
yank my curtains closed
Closed to the scent of moss
to the wail of the wind
to the percussion of the weather.
(I prefer the smell of coffee
the sound of silence
of security.)
"I used to be a lot of things," I call.
"But then I grew up."

II.
She knocks at my door.
Again. (memories are persistent.)
Teasing me with her calm voice
whispering lofty and cool.
I sigh
begrudgingly I follow
sliding into my raincoat
tugging up the hood
drawing the string tight around my jaw.
She dances in watery windchimes
sluicing across the slick sidewalk,
she pirouettes
leaps
beckons for me to follow.
My galoshes are not as forgiving as toe shoes; I trip.
I reach out my hand tentatively
curiously
feel a cold ***** of water slide down my index finger.
Icy. Biting.
I gasp and flick it off.
The world is a box of watercolors
but all smeared together in shades of earth.
Shadow, cornflower, lilac, mud
muddy colors I identify straight away.
They bring a smudgy comfort
a hesitant nostalgia.
I feel a note catch in my throat
like trapping a dragonfly in a glass jar.
It flits violently to escape,
but I dare not let it out.
It is sunny under my umbrella.

III.
Late late night
midnight and a half (to be exact.)
I hear her call
frosting my windows with condensation.
I etch into my foggy breath,
feeling the panes hard against my pale skin.
"Come." says her voice.
"Listen--" I protest.
"Live." urges her whisper.
So I fling back the door
let the coolness trickle down my head.
Silver bullets sparkle in the moonlight
I tilt my face towards the crystal beads,
watch them pour across my face.
I shake my flimsy nightgown
sodden with tears never shed.
I twirl, laughing across the yard.
"Old friend, how I have missed you!"
The rain calls to me.
My tears melt with hers
tumbling down my neck.
My words burst forth, a crescendoing horn
swelling across the rooftops
resounding to the deepest roots of the trees.
"I don't want to grow up."

I suppose that I should be writing about the pencil itself, how its pale cerulean self lights up my taupe desk (yes, taupe.), or perhaps how the navy stamps that embellish it bleed a little at the sides
smeared, or even the sheer fact that it says "hoppy Easter"with little bunnies on it, which is ironic because it is January.
(and even funnier because the little bunnies look like demons waiting to pounce on your soul, slightly feline...feline bunnies?)
But no.
I sing instead the song of that metal thing at the end of the pencil, crimped like a tin can stuck in a sixties hair salon--the small item that sort of resembles Darth Vader; the metal thing that, when you think about it, you never notice; the thing that holds the eraser in place and the lead in the wood, and the wood in a line, the line for your pencil holder at the top of your desk (your taupe desk) that you write on and without writing you'd die...
Without life you don't exist.
I sing to the tiny piece of metal that is out of place, yet holds the world as we know it together. Because in a way, I know how it feels to bridge together two elements; two worlds, if you will.
It's a difficult task indeed to hold it all together. And I realize, staring at the satanic rabbits adorning my writing utensil that this thing doesn't have a name.

Come, scream my name as I fly down the hall
chattering like a bird, my hair soaring like wings.
You can see me.
I pretend not to notice the world, even though I do.
It's just easier this way.
I spot you on the stairs,
Just a glimpse and my veins turn to ice,
rooting me to the spot.
You infuriate me and criticize my every word.
If I were a Jane Austen character, I might find you irritating.
I might find you slightly jerkish.
I would certainly not find you endearingly charming.
I certainly don't see you as such, where did you get such a ridiculous idea?
You're just a possibility, a marked-out one at that.
Not yet real enough to hazard a guess.
All I know is you're different from anything I've ever encountered:
A peacock in Antarctica,
A shaft of sunlight in an attic,
A diving stick in the shallow end,
Coffee, drunk black, when the barrista serves me creamer
and all I wanted was a taste of it undiluted and strong.
All I know is one day, I'll look outside my bubble and up the stairs
and there you will be.
I won't look away.
You won't either.
Then my face will turn the color of tomato soup,
I will find it becoming increasingly more difficult to breathe,
and everyone's eyes will pierce through me like tissue paper.
I will fly down the hall, chattering
chattering like a bird in a cage.
I will pretend not to notice the world.
I will pretend not to notice you pretending not to notice me.
It's just easier that way.

I step towards the pool.
You look at me like each step is the end of my life.
I swing my leg on the side.
You flinch.

I laugh at your expression.
You didn't find it quite so funny.
I guess it's really not that funny to you,
how your mouth puckers into a straight line when you hear me laugh,
like the picket fence outside the house you were born in,
only the stark white boards of that fence don't curve downwards at the ends.

There's a fine line of difference between us,
the difference being "don't", "won't", "can't"
and other four letter words, such as "fear", "play", and "lame".

I stifle my laughter and try again to coax you to the edge, the edge of the earth.
You frown, and back away, mumbling like that one Muppet.
Beaker, right?
"Come down!" Beaker cries. "You're being crazy!"
Meepmeep.
The thought of this causes me to laugh again.
You. A Muppet.
You would die if you knew.

I take another step, another, another, further away from you,
up the metal rungs to the top of the world.
The ground slaps beneath me, resilient and springy like summer grass.
I remember your face, panicked, frantic.

I dove.
You claimed you couldn't.

From the bottom of the pool, the world is crisp and clear,
like a vat of liquid nitrogen biting at my skin.
When I resurface it becomes blatantly evident.

I dry off and walk away through the counter.
Don't try to follow me.
I tried.
You didn't.
Maybe I AM crazy.

The bottom line is
even though I'm afraid of heights,
I still climbed that ladder.

I'm Bailey.
I sometimes forget to recycle.
I'm from singing camels and trigonometry.
From soap bubbles and yellow scarves, Irish hymns and Zucchini the ferret,
piano keys, bluebonnet seeds, and DO NOT ENTER signs.
From salt.
I'm the color of hosed off sidewalk chalk.
I'm all summer in a day.
I'm a conglomeration of artistic thoughts that make me look more profound than I actually am.
I'm your infinite playlist.
I'm from elephant necklaces and rosemary bushes
from high-heeled taps and Camelot
threadless socks, shopping carts, and impromptu salons.
I'm the fifth ninja turtle.
I live where you laugh so hard you cry.
I'm from carrots and ranch.
I'm a happy cow from California, a fortune cookie with your enchilada, a drill team skirt over marching uniforms.
I'm from unfinished crossword puzzles and forgotten dead languages
from pixie dust and snapcracklepop
from actually-it's-pronounced's, because-i-said-so's, and that's-not-my-name's.
I am Nancy Drew with a Peter Pan complex.
I come from honeysuckle candles and sunroofs of pickup trucks
broken-down fences and peach salsa
the second you step onstage.
I'm from in between.
I'm Bailey.
I don't drive the speed limit.
And I'm from you.

So I've been thinking lately

What if
he's on a journey out to find himself
reading Hemingway and Emerson (his namesake) and roughing it at Walden Pond
smoking foreign cigars
and staring deep into coffee
to decipher the meaning of the swirls of smoke
that rise from it in the morning?
What if
he's asking ChaCha! the meaning of life
or trying out a new brand of shampoo
or attempting to set a high score on Tetris
or out burning down bridges just to see them ablaze
or doing volunteer work,
reading to disabled children at the local library?
What if
he's decided that this is all too much,
that he'd prefer to live in anonymity
trading his celebrity for secretarial work or carrot-harvesting
or breeding exotic fish
or renting out those inflatable jumping-castles?
What if
he's tired of all those books in Technicolor
all the paparazzi out to get him
and commercialize his favorite beanie
just because he's on vacation because he pulled some strings at the office
thus catapulting him into some movie set halfway across the world?
What if he's sick and tired of them hunting down his girlfriend
his dog
that random wizard mentor guy that's a deadringer for Dumbledore?
What if he would rather sit at home and watch the Game Show Network
and change his name to something boring like John instead of living up to a thinker's expectations?
Or maybe just the opposite, he's just watching Family Feud to pass the time because he WANTS to be a thinker
but doesn't know how?
Or maybe Family Feud just makes him lonely because he doesn't have a real family,
just that evil guy with funny glasses and ****** hair and an awful Hamburglar taste in clothes?
What if he's decided he's on the wrong path
and needs to turn his life around?

What if Waldo doesn't want to be found?

We walk the world slowly
to pluck from thin air the sounds we've been thinking (or at least, I have)
but some curtain hangs between the realms of thought and reality
and won't let me transcend the division.

If I could pick the words up from the cracked sidewalk,
scattered like magnetic poetry on the concrete, I would.
But look, even if I could, I wouldn't be able to piece them together in a coherent fashion.
With my luck, I'd scramble to pick them up
only to have them fall into place in a different language entirely.

So we continue to walk, ignoring the phrases glistening like raindrops on our shoulders.
I watch the way your hair curls.

Decisions, decisions. Can we never go back?
The road's right here, and we've been there before,
retracing the bricks of the streets isn't in any way difficult.

But it's all in the past tense (or something of that sort)
and somewhere I purposely took a fork in the road
because I thought you'd stopped following my lead long ago.

My life is a series of crossed-out calendars,
and I scooted them aside to pencil you in.
But you didn't come.
You never came.

So I veered off course into my own little world.
Can you really blame me?
Here they all know me,
where I live down cobblestone lanes with my music and twelve cats named George.

I've accepted their offer because it held more water than yours...
(I was never quite sure what you were proposing anyway.)
At least I've allowed you this one last opportunity to break something
that wasn't really solid in the first place, and you're still suspending it.

The road's right here. I suppose we could go back.
But I'm not sure if I want to anymore.
My yes-or-no questions don't allow you much wiggle room.
They never did.

You look at me hard as if there's some constellation etched in my freckles, mapping your escape, your options, your halfway-open door.
I laugh and take a step back.
"It's a yes-or-no, dear."

I know I resemble a crazy, but truthfully? I don't really mind.
I leave you by a tree for shelter, stomp through the puddles down the street.
"Goodbye!" I scream.
"See you soon!" you reply.
"Orrrrr, how about never?" I shriek to the sky.

I prance down the roads, rattling with laughter.
I'd try to cry, but the tears don't come.
They never do.

And that's when I see them, glimmering at me like rain on the pavement.
"Mai dire mai."
I scoop them up in my pockets and call it poetry.