lapidary
“This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
I keep meeting the girl with the long dark braid. She ties it with a thin thread that disappears in the chestnut braid that dangles down her back past her waistline. She always wears light denim jeans with a wide cuff. Her hips are broad and accentuated by the small pockets on either side of the gold button at her navel. The pockets look sewn shut. A waste of real estate though I can’t imagine what she would fit in such a space.
If she knew me, I would write her tiny love letters on slips of paper I folded just to fit in those pockets. I would write in the purple hex code that keeps popping up. It’s #E6E6FA if you want to use it- I don’t mind. It’s so pale she cannot read them unless it’s twilight. By the lamp of the fireflies, she’d tuck her pointer and middle fingers into the pocket on the left side of her jeans and pull out one note. She’d unfold it and smooth it over a thigh before holding it up for the moon to read the love story that blossomed in a mango field.
I daydream about following her braid through thick trees with low-hanging fruit. Mangos, oranges, bananas. I’d run through the fruit trees to catch up with her. She’s really fast despite the too-tight denim. When I reach my hands out for the braid, I smell citrus and my palms come back in eyesight full of blood oranges we’d cut in half and suck until our lips were purple and swollen.
I’d rather sleep in the forest of citrus, but a goddess like her prefers a wide bed where she can unwind her hair and layer it on silk pillow sheets. She wears the same lace nightgown with sleeves that puff at the shoulder and show her clavicle. A little key she traces with a lotion that smells like cinnamon and almond milk. I watch her unravel that crown she keeps and once she’s done, her face is simple as a loaf of sourdough. I only catch her profile before she slips between the cold sheets, an aquiline nose and eyebrows dark as the dunes in the shadows. She never says goodnight.
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