Fragments: Part VI
It was the first time I began to understand what it meant to let someone down. No one likes to be left out in the rain.
Red nail varnish is not for the faint of heart, at least not for those who use their hands, because, as though it gleams in early wear, it only takes the smallest chip, and how the cracks begin to show. Forget doing the dishes or keeping white paper devoid of small red marks while moving a pen across the page.
My friend calls it “fuck-me red,” but this shade is like venous blood that flows from deeper cuts. Perhaps that’s why it feels so powerful, like wearing a piece of your insides at the tips of where you connect to the world, in systole and diastole.
It had rained overnight, and I’d left her out in the garden. Upon retrieval, she was sodden, her stitched-in-place smile smeared with dirt, the cotton of her dress and stockings three shades darker than before. Her red yarn hair hung, waterlogged and weighty on a fragile neck, the dye seeping into the cornflower blue of her dress. I watched as my mother held the Raggedy Ann tenderly, purple smudges on her fingertips, examining the damage done.
It was the first time I began to understand what it meant to let someone down. The doll was much older than I, and no one likes to be left out in the rain. The way that we take care of things, big or small, can say a lot about how we move through the world. I resolved at 6, I would be kinder.
We lay below a starry sky, the Milky Way painted in spirals around the light fixtures, a blessed breeze wafting in from the faraway windows. Breathing on all sides of me, I roll my head from side to side and watch the way the diaphragm balloons and then sulks, the angle of arms, all kinds of wrists, and elbows. The firmness of the floor at my back and the curve of the spine. Soon we would be up again, a mass of rolling bodies, socks spinning, toes gripping, no two things the same, and yet moving in some kind of harmony. For now, we just lie.