it's all about the exposure, the lens, I told her

You need to be strong to do that job, to have an actor's life.

And you need to be fragile.


-Melanie Laurent

(i spend my days as carefully as i spend my coins)

i've been called an odd bird more times in my life than i care to count (i've always disliked mathematics, you see). i've often thought that was the loveliest thing anybody's ever said about me. it signifies rarity and difference and a sort of unusual beauty. my wide, black eyes and hair dark and shiny like a raven's feathers. and God didn't make birds to be pets.

winged creatures
bold as brass, sweet as the sea, free as the four winds
traveling south for the winter to the tropics in boats and vessels,
vessels like veins, pumping blood and exhaust,
working at being alive.

i come often to the docks to sit with my pale, bare feet soaking in the salty calm. in an oversized t-shirt, one sleeve slips off a shoulder. a sailor walking past looks over and it's one of those stolen glances, probably meaningless to him but enough to keep me going for days. i open my mouth a little, about to whistle, but a motor starts up and steals the silence right out of me. after a pause, i try again—but instead of a nursery lullaby filled with ache and wanderlust, a sharp, uncontrolled noise fills my breath. the sound is unsettling: the opposite of novocaine or the vacuous aesthetics of communism. it's a lone bird wailing to itself as it flaps about yesterday's nesting home, broken now on the ground, spilled yolk and unlived life among the dirt and tree roots.

my grandmother's hat threatens to flap off my head; i grab my crown with white fingers and release a little sigh, unheard by everything except the gold whistle my mouth absently chews. my lips suck on it, a replacement for the lollipops of my younger days. i'm thinking (nearly ever) on places i haven't been.

significance in a flash

He was twenty-two, I was just turned fourteen, and he changed the way I see.

The day I met him it was chilly and wet outside, one of those times where it's rainy, only nobody seems to see it actually rain. My legs ached with the chill, like an elderly person or a cat. I wanted to spend an hour or two in my favorite bookstore—it's on main street downtown, this cramped little place with crooked shelves and old, old books. I wanted to touch all of the treasures there, because each of them was magical and revealing; you could tell it by their spines. A set of faded green tomes with scaly covers and gold block lettering, a fat pinkish-red novel with black embossed palm trees, yellow and black criss-crossing, and lavendar, and numbered sets. My fingertips drifted over their dusty shells and I pulled a random one off the shelf. Opened to a random page, and read

There it was again - ! the music she was hearing, the sound of warring bells. Frantically, she looked about - left! right! - and cried out. Her feet caught on something and she fell, her knees banging hard on the unrelenting floorboards. A low, ominious noise crept through the air -

And then I heard the click, the snap, the whir of a camera and a bright, brief light. My first sight of his face was an apologetic smile, sparkling eyes that seemed to match the sweet darkness of the furthest corners, and words explaining that if he'd asked to take my picture, it wouldn't have turned out so well, and he hoped I didn't mind. Seizing moments and all that.

If I'd known what would happen later, if I'd realize then the mark this boy - no, this man - would leave on me, would I still have followed him out into the cloudy afternoon? Would I have reached for his hand, those weeks later? Would I have stared out my window as the first snow fell and wondered how it would feel to touch his lips with mine?

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