Ohh, the sun fried crisp in honeyyy
Dripping on the refreshing skyyy
The businessman's hair gel is runnyyy
Money is his life is all a lieee
Thoughts made no sense in my head, but the melody was caught in my head like a fly in a spiderweb and the complex mapping of cityscape was enough to keep it reeling. I tried to skip out of the sheer irony of a medieval weather in a metropolitan setting, but the droning hub of pedestrians drowned out my whimsy. Immediately my feet landed on the cracked cement, dragging my head from the clouds. Shake. Walking along, I stepped up to a brisk stroll. But my eyes kept on watching. The city kept unraveling. My feet stepping. My heart drumming.
Night crept up like a yawn, but I was still restless. School was over, summer was before me like suburban sprawl and I still felt the vacancy that papers and exams left in my schedule. I hate that word - 'schedule'. It makes me think of a tall, skyscraping bureau of thousands of little knobbed drawers labeled with dry words. Each of those drawers has receipt-thin papers with procedures written on them in some sort of code. I've never cracked the code. The code is written in Courier New and is spotted with abbreviations. My mom cracks a wooden stick on my open palms. I shudder out of my dreamlike metaphor. Schedule means responsibility means obligation means punishment. I shudder at the word 'punishment'. The city is yawning.
Night makes me think of the blackness of my mother's hair that stained the hair of my sisters and myself. Thick and bundled like massive ink brushes that wait patiently on our shoulders like a writer's burden. They are brushes full of ink that have never stroked paper. We carry them like broken wings, impatient and walking and walking. I wonder, can we write our stories with our feet? Stroking the pavement, my pedestrian canvas, with the voiceless pounding of my unresolved arguments and hopeless thoughts. But the rubber on the soles of my feet erases my memories, rather than preserve them, as I walk down the street to the next chapter.
I still remember a time when I lived with them, I screamed too loudly when a moth escaped the kitchen cabinet and the cans of tomato sauce cascaded onto the stove and exploded. But somehow I was quiet in the sanctuary of my room when my arms were covered in red writing, swollen from pressure. (Why don't you care). At the time, I did not know what cliche meant, nor the fact that thousands of others were displaying symptoms of a birthing world. Had I known, my mocking laughter would have made more sense. My mom was cooking something in the kitchen that smelled fishy and salty, while my toddler sisters wrestled on the kitchen floor. Ha. Ha. Ha. The mirror reflection returns my laughter, jeering with large beady eyes and a jutted jaw that grows bigger and drooling. Its hair grows dry like a walnut tree in the winter and splits into millions of tiny threads that seep out into the corners of the mirror. Amused, I bare my teeth and growl. The reflection fades at once into my old, kneeling self. I'm not afraid of you.
A rapidly snarling dog jerks me from contemplation in front of my apartment. Anger immediately flares up within me towards the owner. I tell it, 'I know how you feel'. Cooing to the dog like it was a puppy, I dig into my bag to find the leftover pizza and begin to feed it. His growl softens to a questioning whimper, scarfing ravenously while occasionally snarling at me through his mistrusting and longing eyes. I see humanity in his eyes. I see myself in his eyes. Millions of splintered bodies, ravaged, neglected, hopeless faces are staring out in his tiny pupils that seem simultaneously overjoyed with the cold and dry scrap of food that it is consuming.
