The Champagne Soapbox

Southerners know the smell of rain like the cedar they splinted with a kindergarten foot. My bedroom drywall that I crushed in my teens. Between my white four corners, I found a perching window for my bent legs to find held. When I jump, I crash through the branches just to land among the roots of my childhood backyard tree.

In the way the morning sky reflects on water, I lay amongst my disposition to find the moon highlights my smile. Darkness surrounds me; light always finds me. When it rains, her smile captures the tears from the sky. She swallows them whole and her pores melt away heaven’s pollution in the clear, green mass. One day, I will become the soil; reflect the darkness of the old splintered cedar and heirloom my brightness to the remaining. So many elements in this world for us to experience and then set free.

I’d pick a story to picture for myself at night, most of the time manifesting an adulthood of living alright. Going to the grocery store or putting off dirty laundry while my REM eyes roll in circles left to right. My hair sprawled between four pillows, never comfortable enough to complete the holes in the tight fibers making up my cheap sheets. Staring at the ceiling fan, hoping it falls down for a story about overcoming the maybes from a might. I pictured this life so much that living now is sleeping between silent daydreams and being awake for most the night.

I want to lay in the warm rain to watch the nightmarish shadows thin to an equal gray. Now that I’m older, I can turn her blemished, teenage chin to the other shoulder. Still laying amongst southeast trees, I found years later that the grass where I laid left a bed in your shape. I now wake up in my mass of pillows wondering why my dreams are better when I’m awake, staring through your eyes deciphering your cultivating grace.

My bedroom was a bunch of colors. They started as yellow, and now they’re gray. I moved into this new place where the walls are white. Encountering people who grew up on different advice, the boys who aren’t nice. My dad hated recitals but loved when my front-middle spot was in the light. The addictive nostalgia I find in center-stage, looking for my dad in the priority seating but totally out of my sight. I picked people beyond the spotlight, waiting in the shadows to lure me with monochrome flowers and an after-show soliloquy fight. I love my dad, men who provide soft rain turning into sunlight.

Sometimes I’m convinced that he waits for the sun to rise just so he could hand it to me. I could wrap my arms around the warmth and melt in the staring sweetness, completing the holes between his sheet fibers. It’s easy to become dizzy from his brightness, even his silver chain flickers in the darkness. His grace keeps me from fighting gravity; I find myself floating towards him closer than my allowing physicality. My dirty shirt smells like cologne and his kindness and my spirituality. I find this to be the easiest difficulty: allowing myself a life full of emotional luxury. I whispered a sweet nothing from across the room while he was already smiling at me.

As much as he is the sunshine, I crave the rain. Jumping in oceans just to find his fingers already reaching for my waist. I sense my younger self wanting to drink his pouring love until my drunken teenage addictions wane. I wish summer could end sooner just so I could admire the breath he sighs in full winter clarity. I found that my love grows among the roots of the tree in the place where it never snows. He whispers sweet nothing in his sleep, and I get sleepy goosebumps from the glow of his sincerity. His empty cup sits next to the one completely filled. I fell asleep, so I spill mine to make his half empty. Our parent’s advice stem from neighboring trees.

Emotions reveal themselves to us in the way devoted artists place their destiny’s work against a glass picture frame. I’ll sit to watch his video game, comment things just to hear how his laugh sounds when I hide myself behind a provocative screen name. All of my dreams are movies that he has already seen. We argue about what we’re going to wear on Halloween. I know I’m in Heaven, because hands make Hell seem cold and life alone seem Purgatory. Hell froze over in the three days I spent away. I drifted through people getting off the plane just so my world can begin again after the cold delay. There’s a piece of me melted on the left side of his neck, and I smelled his cologne and his kindness and whispered sweet nothings like ‘i wrote so much; this is the best day.’

I’ve lost so many free days to simple growing pains; time has become a delicacy. My body is older and alcohol is poison and balancing emotions becomes my winning game and legacy. My aching feet are a sign of a relentless spirit – well, I fell in the parking garage doing a one-handed cartwheel. I tell time to slow down while I stand to watch the ticker match twelve. I mark my calendar by the days where time stood still, and by the sunrises spent looking out from someone else’s, his, windowsill.

In the staring whiteness, I assume these past emotions as something to let free. Accepting my boyish treat in this world as a treaty from the universe regarding the girl who once laid on the ground burning her eyes, wondering when her time will be. I wonder about the last time we existed as just friends, now whispering sweet nothing in between sweet everything for everyone to notice and believe. When I jump and allow life to be, I hope to fall through the branches in southeast trees. Always only a few minutes away from me: in a house, by a car, pull me away from the inside of the street, in the apartment a block away from 24th Street. Two planets maintaining magnetizing gravity, illuminating each other in shared brightness for all darkness to see.