Today, I’m surrounded by Neptune’s center, which
isn’t as blue as a person would expect. Everything interesting and cloudlike
exists outside, held together by her father’s fingers. White floor and black
walls, a woman clad in floating rings of water. Her body is made of opal and
she’s the center of the center, having dragged me from Barcelona. I remember
dancing through a local flea market after fishing my purple ballet slippers
from my mother’s closet. It was a Tuesday. Earlier, I ate a blueberry snowcone
and watched a bird flap helplessly in the gutter. “What’s the matter?” she
asks. She stops floating in mid-air and the water rings swirl around her genitalia
like moons. Her skin is lavender in the light and her smile is made of robin
feathers. I feel she is laughing at me. “You’re so different from me. You’re
made of starlight. I’m going to die before you turn twenty-three.” Her smile
widens and morphs into gold-plated birch leaves. She takes my hand, puts a
finger to my left eye, except I am her and she is opposite me. I am the core of
the core of Neptune, with opal skin turning periwinkle in the light. I’m
bursting with starlight and threatening to super nova and pass into
immortality. And she’s smiling, magnified by death, a grin made of bees and
ladybugs.
