angel child
Katie
It was when my mother yelled at me for doing the dishes wrong and when the fat stacks of chemistry worksheets appeared on my desk, and—what I remember most vividly—when the crash of Starbucks-obsessed pre-teens roller skated straight at me, their suspiciously hot magenta solutions seeping venomously through my favorite patchwork jacket. I remember the clouds were sad that day—the brief moment between a pure marigold glow and poetically ugly sobbing. If it wasn’t for him, it could have easily been one of the worst days of my life.
Oftentimes I wonder if it is him I need to thank or the baby chicks. Or the gas station worker, or maybe the glittery aquarium keychain hanging off my backpack. But after a deep analysis, it seems apparent to me that with him I am thankful for everything. Nobody ordinary can make one be so heart-wrenchingly grateful to keychains.
He is the type of boy who goes to potlucks to only pick the plates of food nobody has touched, because he feels sorry for whichever unfavored poor being. The type of boy to hold his mother’s hand wherever he goes, even if he’s a little too old for that. The type to sing the songs he loves as loud as he can and plug his ears when others distaste rolls in.
I think within me there is a bit of yearning. It is not even breaths I take but more like clenches of my heart. The sort of tension that is what keeps fingers grasped onto the side of a breaking cliff.
But him, I can see his heartbeats ring out in hymns.
.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.
That day I had cried twice because I couldn’t figure out how to pump gas without the Chevron guy snickering and because of those stupid pre-teens. It was the crying that had really screwed me up. Looking into the mirror and seeing red, almost freakish eyes—makeup churned into sewer water sliding off the neck—was truly too much to bear. Who do I think I am, sprawled across bathroom tiles and weeping? I cannot be doing this. I refuse to be like this. My only solution was to at least try to look like I had the best day of my life and go outside to let people see and think, “Damn, who made her this cheerful? I want to be as happy as that girl.” So in that attempt to hide my inner despair, I ran down the gloomy street in freshly ironed clothes and a clean backpack to the closest utopia: a dollar store.
It was the Asian kind that had arcade machines lining up the entrance, plushie claw machines, and overpriced Pac-Man games. The walls were lined with plastic storage bins of patterned origami paper and buckets of glitter gel pens. Outdated J-Pop hummed brokenly through the speakers. It was a tiny store, but its walls leaked the sounds of rattling gumball machines and the smooth gliding of multicolored highlighters, the giggles under a blanket of stars, and secrets stolen on the playground. If I stayed still for a minute, I felt I would nearly bawl because the atmosphere would have swallowed me. It held nostalgia—the genuine joy of waking up and going to bed. For when we cared so much about cheap blind boxes and the cartoon characters sewn on our lunch boxes. For when what mattered most was what was for dinner and if it was our turn on the swings.
It was why I felt comforted here; with the walls stacked with toys and books I used to beg for, the store was a rip in expensive, royal satin fabric, exposing the time of my life where I genuinely thought that purity would last forever.
I hadn’t felt something so pure like those years in a long time.
.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.
When I was not more than eight years old, I attended a summer camp where one of the many activities they had us do was arts and crafts. The type where college kids plop a plastic bucket of beads and popsicle sticks and glitter glue onto a picnic bench and have a bunch of elementary schoolers fight over it. I watched as my friends climbed the table and over each other’s limbs, arguing with each other, their hands scooping through the buckets like they were burrowing against sand. Even as their necklaces and dollhouses started to string and stick together, jumbled messes of plastic pearls and hot glue, I remember vividly I had only sat on the grass, picking carefully through the crevices for lost beads. Eventually I had managed to gather a few resin fish charms and neon glass beads, and to this day the brightest bulb of creativity struck me, and I shoved it all in a translucent Christmas ornament. My one true pride and joy, an aquarium keychain born from dirt.
What had stuck with me for almost a decade was that my fellow campers had loved it—loved it so much my dear ornament was paraded around and I was floating in the clouds, tasered with admiration, angel-like beams that tickled my heart.
Even now, nothing I have ever done or made has come close to that bliss, the type that makes you love yourself so much it’s like the love is gushing out.
.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.
So I stumbled into paradise haphazardly, wiping off the pieces of hair that had blown and stuck to my sweating face. The shop wasn’t very crowded, but I could hear muffled chatter of the occasional customers that passed between the aisles.
There was a cardstock celebration card that caught my eye. It peaked out of the next aisle like a beacon calling. Watercolor chicks swept on the front cover, over pale green stalks, and gold text etched lightly underneath: Congratulations on your newborn. I squinted, trying to get a better look. And in my muffled vision popped a hand of delicate fingers holding white flowers. Daisies.
When I stood with a wet, salty face and sore eyes, when my heart heaved of weight, I met him. Brown hair. Big eyes. To be honest, I can barely picture his face. That’s the weird part. Meeting somebody so beautiful that they don’t even seem real.
But I remember he laughed and wore a bright blue graphic tee with embroidered pictures. I remember his cheeks were bright pink and airbrushed in freckles shaped like stars. I also remember he couldn’t have been more than eight.
When he blinked, there was a sudden flush of a girl with a stained patchwork jacket. When he giggled, his laugh twisted through the air into a glee so familiar yet so untouched. He fidgeted lanyard bracelets, and I twisted gold rings. He skipped in his walk, and I tripped over worn-down sneakers. He held his daisies, and I stood there, my head in my face crying.
I had never met this boy in my life, yet I missed him so much, a type of longing that is only described as claws tearing through a place rooting me down. Like I’d been hollow for so long, only crumbs of dirt and anxiety left in my soul. Until him and his daisies. And abruptly his head twisted, and he saw me, still planted in place but now with tears running down to my neck. I could feel my face being sticky, my muscles too stiff to move. I couldn’t have imagined how completely tragic, disgustingly tragic I probably seemed. But he opened his mouth and said, “I really love your keychain.”