Leaving for aurora borealis
I knew this child once upon a time, before the world was put into heavy frames, before she learned to fill out forms and floss and follow someone else’s nightmare. I knew this child when she drew endless horizons, and she used green and blue crayons in all her pictures and yellow and brown crayons in some of her pictures. And she filled reams of paper which were never framed or put up on the fridge with magnets because her parents were from a place without magnets and had no wings and they didn’t know to rely on the earth’s magnetic field to help them migrate and didn’t think navigation was a thing. They were not bad parents and they were not good parents, they were just like other giants, sometimes terrific and sometimes horrific, though this child couldn’t tell the difference.
I knew this child when she drew landscapes with green on top and blue on the bottom, so the sky was green and the land was blue, and she later sailed across the ocean and halfway around the world in an origami canoe with no GPS, which was before all the water in the world pooled to one side and threw the Earth off its axis and flipped the magnetic poles and scared the atmosphere so bad that it ran off into outer space, leaving the green behind to fend for itself.
Like all children born into dystopia, this child thought nothing of the endless churning of heavy clouds and thunderstorms and abducted Northern Lights resurfacing on the equator, while the giants around her lobbied for a world with no surprises, where up and down were always right, and they weren’t going to take lessons about gravity from a stupid child. So this child added a yellow circle with long yellow spokes to the top corner of her landscapes, and a tree with brown bark in the middle, and she speckled the round leafy crown of her tree with small globes in orange or red — two new colors for her.
The sky was still green behind the sun and the trees, and the earth where the trees threw down roots was blue, and the giants still angry and terrifying. So this child drew three bands across the page — a brown band for the land, a blue band across the middle for all the water in the world, and a green band for the sky — and she jumped into the landscape and sailed across the ocean in her origami canoe, but she was so little she didn’t know she was traveling halfway around the world, she didn’t know the world was round or how to navigate a round world, and when she got back, she didn’t know she’d come back, and her timeline got scrambled as timelines are apt to do, and she found herself in a dusty yard staring for long hours at an image of a stranded child in an abandoned field staring back at her from an old photo with no colors — not even sepia for the withered weeds and parched clods of dirt under her feet and the missing trees above her head, nothing remotely red, and no meeting of green and blue on the horizon — and she ached for the child in the empty field and her heart was squeezed like an orange a giant mom had plucked from the crayoned trees and placed next to the guillotine on the bloody kitchen counter.
For someone like me who learned long ago how to fill out forms and stare into someone else’s nightmare, a word combination like squeezing and orange makes the juice obvious. But this child didn’t understand how the oranges hanging in her trees could be squeezed when they were marinated in silence in nonlinear time in multiple dimensions with no gravity, much like a monochrome image which made her despair over the plight of an unfamiliar child stranded in an abandoned field from which she could never walk away because no one ever leaves a photo or a drawing, whether or not they’re on the fridge or tucked away in a drawer or tumbling down from the back of a garbage truck along with broken frames and torn limbs and mountains of trending trash.
As someone who knows what happens when you pair orange and squeeze, I can tell without looking that the reams of paper this child drew ended up in a landfill, where they might or might not have turned into fleeting sparks of energy depending on how parched the landfill remained over linear time, because even dead trees need both warmth and moisture to start rotting and releasing their colorless CO2 into the leaded atmosphere.
In the end, this child didn’t perish in an air raid or famine or an ebola epidemic, she wasn’t swept overboard and didn’t crash upon a shore or get sick from crayon fumes. She just grew into a faceless giant and put everything but her landscape pictures into frames. Even her crayons were framed inside their cardboard box — tiny stubs of green and blue, half-length yellow and brown, slightly worn down orange and red, and half a dozen other colors as good as new. And sometimes she’d open the box and take a peek before replacing the cover and putting it away. And she’d stock up on reams of paper, all new, all blank. And she carried the box of crayons and the new paper with her everywhere she went, packing and unpacking crayons and paper without ever bringing them together again.
And after she learned to fill out forms and show a passport in all the gates and cover the fridge with fun magnets and follow arbitrary rules because someone with a gun said so, she stumbled one day upon the blank paper she’d been carrying around the world with her and started blanketing it with endless combinations of roughly two dozen letters with spaces and specks in between.
I knew this child once upon a time, though this child didn’t know me, and like any twain where sky and land shed the horizon so they wouldn’t have to meet, this child and I went our separate ways, and I never got to learn what happened to her or to the stranded child from the abandoned photo in the empty field. But I know what it’s about because I’ve got my own letter combinations sloshing around behind my eyes, before I put them into heavy frames, before they went overboard, before I threw open the door and stepped outside into the auroral green.
