For July and for Owl City.
Let’s say that humans have nine lives and this is my second life.
My first was a life of discovery and amazement funneling down into a cryptic
close, and I wasn’t worrying because I still had eight more lives to spend. And hopefully I do spend wisely
as not to waste.
My first life was a book of fresh faces – the pillars and
waves of teeming journal entries and biographies. This life had begun in
between wet eyelashes and flipping notebook pages. A collection of fiction and
not, I originated and lived without panic.
My Mondays were sewn with the tapping of feet and the
blowing of wind, my place of relaxation and study as a twenty year old was a
house near the beach where I could breathe way easier. I created dance steps
and procrastinated. I was crammed with word document appointments. I was too
engulfed in the work of fixing my TV set and staring at dresses and bowties on
the Internet. I was a silly lady made out of sharp pencil markings and long
hair. I was a borrowed ballerina shoes; I was a freckled face – too sunshine; I
was a ponytail snaking down to my tailbone – the colors of black and red were prominent.
Nine years old of first life was when I would always jump
out and shout in the rain. My name was Z – like, maybe, zealous! – and when my
first life’s fourteenth year came I sat among a couple of friends and their
stuffed toys to hit our faces with cake of strawberry icing. I bounced from
cloud to cloud when it was a Christmas blue, and I can only recall the jukebox
pumping out notes by Momma’s Diner as my good friend Rende (like the rende of rendezvous) leaped from dead rock to
sleeping frog with my collection of films. That thief.
My twenty-first came one day and I made the bell ring once
again in the nearby library of Mrs. Monica. I showed her my doodles of Rende
and that diner one time it snowed abundantly, making sure my toothy smile was safely
inches away from her frowning one. But I can tell you that she smiled at the
end of our almost one-sided conversation; Mrs. Monica may have already been
eighty-seven and a widow, but she breathed in stories the way I breathed in
paint. She loved, loved, loved it.
So I told her another story and whispered it, saying, “You
know, ma’am, I used to bounce from cloud to cloud.” She pushed her pair of
glasses back and inquired, “You stopped?” And I laughed. I don’t know why I
laughed, but I did. It was more like a small snicker to myself – a sarcastic
and bitter one. Oh, I did stop.
“Mrs. M, of course I did!” I smiled. She grew a smile. And
she told me to continue hopping until something stopped me.
That was when my pencils unraveled themselves from my
fingers and drew that Christmas blue back. “How can I, Mrs. M?” I always called
her Mrs. M. I already had called her that half a dozen of times that day. But I
was afraid. I had not cloud-hopped in a long time. My jukebox wasn’t there; my
diner wasn’t there; and my good friend Rende Zvous wasn’t there.
She told me, so softly, “Believe.” That word took me aback,
but I stood in place; I feared my pencils and I feared myself. “You’ll die and
you’ll live. Be yourself, miss Z. You have won the Christmas blue before, and
you will again. Behold, the sun is shining! You are sunny, too. But you know
you belong in the world of the moon and the stars, child. I will miss you. Your
books will miss you. But Christmas blue misses you much, much more.”
Mrs. Monica blew my jukebox at me, and it landed on four
stars next to Momma’s Diner. She hauled – and I almost shrieked for she mustn’t
carry such a massive thing! – the world at me and before I could catch it with my
hands, my heart did. I breathed out a few wishes, a few hopes, and a few
miseries. I kept more to myself. But still–
I hopped.
