muse ariadne

remember a moment that’s both nostalgic and visceral. it can be old or new, but something that feels both vague and like you can still feel it in your skin, muscle, and bones. write about it however feels right.

I use my mom’s canary-yellow cruiser to get the zoo early in the morning. The ride is short but I get exercise, and the world is just somehow kinder at seven a.m. in the summertime. I like the quiet, the haze of the pollen in the air (the linden trees are blooming and they make the world smell sweet), held heavy by the morning dew. I see it over the stretches of lawn being irrigated, the sprinklers making mist rainbows above the scraggly, overheated grass, and above it, the cloying fog of June.

I’ve never loved the summer; I’m temperamental in the heat and I hate that the street racers stay out until ten, eleven, twelve on the warm nights doing laps around the city. But today just had that kind of feeling. One of those precious moments when the pearly membrane that separates now from then is stretched thin enough to be nearly transparent around you. From behind the swirling abalone separation you will feel yourself, younger, experiencing that same moment for the first time. It’s overcast, the bees are humming, bearded on the side of their home, the honeysuckle ripening right outside your window. The geese spread across the park in magnificent swaths, watching carefully as you bike past them. Faraway doves coo.

write about evolution and devolution. how do we unravel & re-ravel? think about what histories our bodies & communities & species & worlds are made of.

I dip my hand into the water. You, a creature, crawl onto my finger, your slick pink back rounded and speckled by the chemicals you gorge yourself on. Flamingos are the color they are because of the shrimp they eat. Maybe you're the same. 

Your eyes are tiny, glossy seeds on the sides of your head. I lift you up to my eve level. We watch each other suspiciously. My distorted face is reflected back at me in the dark pools you see from. Almost like you aren’t watching me at all. Maybe I’m projecting. Either way, I sit, crouched, my wrist balanced against my knee. So that you are not thrown off.

And in a million years: Your blushing shell has flattened, your eyes sunk. I see it like a montage. 1,000,000 versions, year after year, shapeshifting on my finger. I watch your beautiful carapace be crushed by time, over and over. Do you miss your old shape? Your gills hold atmosphere from decades ago. I kneel through time, stolid for you, through flood and drought, submerged and not, under shade and in the ripe heat of the spinning sun. You are the victim of yet another of Nature’s attempts to evolve the perfect Crab, or so Borradaile said.

And therein lies the carcinization question. Is it right to become a crab? Is it moral? Did you really have any say in the first place? What might you have become if your world did not have some kind of uncaring compulsion to create convergence, evolutionary likeness.

Another daughter, daughter, daughter, so on and so forth, perched on my knuckle. Smooth and sprawling, torpidly modified in this laboratory-world until her species disappears. Born to change and die. Little body made to suit nature’s platonic ideal; the perfect creature, halfwit insect of the sea.

write about echoes, sound, and reverberation. what is an echo– just sound or something more? how can it reverberate through past, present, and future? can emotion be an echo in that way? what else can be?

Don't you miss it? The cat lounging under your chair, his foot pressed against your toe, a reassuring presence. When little girls' first priority was to show off their bedroom to you, their little oyster shell world; almost-nacre walls in shades of pink or blue, animal print sheets. A dollhouse, shaped softly and shrouded in lace; the lights crackle.

The cat's ear is feverish against your skin, veins dark against the midwinter sun. Suede fur so thick you can plunge your fingers into it and they're swallowed whole. His whiskers make him look akin to that creature you once saw in a heavy book about the ocean. The pages were huge and glossy, like maybe you could reach your hand in and it would come out soaked in brine, small animals clinging to your pinky. He would fit in underwater if he weren't just a cat asleep at your feet, breaths punctuated with short, fitful snores that cement his status as an Air Breathing Creature. He crawls into the little house, curls into those miniature rooms, stretches out. His head crashes down on a canopy bed so envied by those little girls, whiskers bent against the walls. Rumbling purrs make the whole thing shake.

The cat sleeps on my legs some nights, not often, letting his twitches and sighs seep into my dreams. I fall asleep, thinking of when the worlds collided.

Pimi Pimiento the tortoiseshell who would sit and watch us plainly from across the courtyard of your house, your shell your gated world where not even the sharp and cruel truth that this wouldn't last forever could reach. She was always perched on the wall of the chalky red pila, lingering above where the koi twirled. Her eyes twice the size they should be, but whether in fear or distaste you could not tell. You tipped us backwards on the hammock and I almost slammed my head into the concrete. Dusty orange tile.

The oven clicks clicks clicks, filling the kitchen with cinnamon scented air. You let it warm your back, lean your head against the handle and tuck your knees up close to your face. Maybe this is what it's like to be a child. The smell creeps up the stairs, around the corner, under the blankets cocooning the mother, where she is pillowed and propped, sedate. She remembers but not from your eyes.

We stop at a gas station with teetering shelves full of colorful things to use the cramped bathrooms. Outside, a truck transporting bananas is parked next to our glossy blue car. Truck like a pickup, with a gated bed where the bright fruit lays like treasure. There's a crumbling concrete structure on the beach where I stand alone on the black sand, baking as I watch and wait for that bulletproof sedan with tinted windows to arrive.

You look at me sadly, then leave again. We do kicks in the shallow pool, dragging ourselves through the water by our fingertips. You descend. I meet you at the gate, wave at that opaque window. You're somewhere behind there. I would fit in underwater too, you insist. I glare at you. Unremarkable specimens.

There's a blanket that would go nicely in my room. A hypothetical duvet. Soft and see-through, the pink blue lavender whorls of a jellyfish. My life in your handwriting floats inside; a barbie hairspray, decaying Littlest Pet Shop figurines, sticky notes crawling with love. Our world all wrapped up in threads and stitches. Tendrils on tendrils on tendrils. A window, maybe a shrine. Wrapped around me and you as we watch them stand in the kitchen, framed by the hallway, holding each other, sobbing. Do they know? They're only a memory. There's a picture of it.

A blanket is better than the shoebox you must keep in the back of your closet. Probably full of all the forgotten, ugly things of mine that don't belong in that oyster-shell room of yours. Forgotten even before the knife wedged its way into her world, broke her apart. Revealed the slick and shining beauty hidden beneath a briney, warped exterior. But I digress.

Your loss leaves a gaping hole that hasn't been, can't be filled. Empty space next to you where you know someone is meant to be. Wrenched apart. Bleeding profusely. How long does it take a person-sized wound to scab? You still see her sometimes, in the dark, half-flooded hallways of primary school. She will tilt her head towards you and you think she sees you but she doesn't. She is too lovely and languid to remember you, never a pearl to her, just a grain of sand.

*** not going to lie, this was just something i wrote as a warmup for my creative writing class but i think it fit well with the theme.