Hell or High Water…Melon
“I have a sweet tooth,” I’d say. “It’s this one in front,” pointing to one of my two front chiclets. They though I’d kick the habit as soon as adulthood began pushing the baby traits out of their sockets, or when I flew over my streamed handles, breaking my fall with my mouth on a square of cracked cement, the gray, sparkly kind. But no. Someone built my brother and me a pirate ship in our backyard. By pirate ship, I mean a platform of plywood balanced on pine pegs supporting a square structure with a doorless doorway, an octagon window, and a roof surrounded by a railing, the cake’s cherry, a hand crafted wheel that resembled Captain Hook’s. I fell off of that platform, my fresh skin scraping the splinters that protruded from the beams they forgot to smoothen with sand paper on my way down to an inflatable pool. I clawed my way to the top of a half-domed fence covering home plate at a friend’s birthday party. Somewhere between cramming marshmallow after marshmallow into my mouth in an intense round of chubby bunny and hot dog scarfing, I’d convinced myself that my phobia concerning places of altitude could be cured by tackling the sharply woven wires of that damned fence. I fell on the way back down. At the very least, I can stand with my pride inflating my chest, instead of enlarging my head, when I reveal my inexplicable love affair with America’s favorite past time, regardless of the scraped knees, sore wrists, and bruised ego I sustained as a result of soaring downward from the fence once my shoe had slipped away and my fingers surrendered to searing, screaming under crimson abrasions. But I’ve never minded soaring, or floating, or flying much; quite the contrary! If I had been genetically engineered with the ability to fly, an orange and black cape whipping the wind behind me into cream, the tops of the redwoods finally revealing their beauty, the houses the size of the models my brother used to beat me in Monopoly last week, the cars the atoms making up a cell of… a cell of something, I am not sure, I cannot see that far and I have forgotten my glasses again! Damn! How could I have left my specs behind on my day of blast off!? I am moving to the moon, you see, where I can drift about the cheesy surface, host baseball games in the stadium sized craters, amen the baking temperatures on all of my favorite recipes to correspond to the increased sitance between my oven and sea-level, and not have to worry about the gravity grabbing at my feet ever again. it is probably pretty impossible to trip, stumble, falter, or find yourself face to face with the floor when the force that fucks with your equilibrium is nowhere to be found. Plus, I hear the Earth is breathtaking this time of year against the sugar sprinkled asphalt sky. I can’t stand it here anymore in California; I’m growing more claustrophobic with every cosmetic surgery executed, every actor who’s elected politically, with every penny that’s pinched from parents’ pockets to push us to the surface of a sea of debt, with the hipster’s elevator eyes stopping at each of my floors to criticize. I need space. Outer space. I can’t get off the ground down here.
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