Bienvenida, mija de luz

she’s watching me. those brown irises follow me, and though i lock eyes with the pillars, the chapel walls, the grasses waving just beyond, i can’t shake her. i call her sunflower girl, this figment of my dreams. 

“have you ever fallen in love?” she asks. leaving the stone steps, i ignore her question. i gave up talking to the voices in my head a long time back. “i think i might love you,” she continues. 

“you don’t know what love is,” i want to say. i stop myself. in the midst of the field, caterpillar weeds poke their seedy noses through dead brush and wildflowers. i gave myself permission to pluck the greens during the height of summer. yet sunflower girl’s soft gaze accuses me of leaving too many flowers out here to die of hypothermia. 

she tramples the grass just behind me, her perfume wafting over my shoulder. “i think you love me too.”

i need to confront her. resolve the matter immediately. “I…” 

She waits. Damn her. 

Then I’m falling, her heart pounding in my open palms. I see the outlines of her scars with the vibrant overlap of the neurologists who mapped the first complete neural brain network. Every book comes to the sidelines of my mind, thousands of pages ready to draw her inspiration from. 

She needs a name. You can’t just call her Sunflower Girl. She needs a friend. She isn’t here to rescue you. She needs you to love her. 

i push her and the dancing and the books aside. “i am not a writer anymore,” i say. the grasses flutter, wind catching its swoosh through their touch. lake brine replaces her scent, and i know she will return another time. 

i settle back onto the step. typically by now, i’d have completed my meditation and physically returned to the surface worlds. yet, i stay. 

i fear i will see her again when i leave. she’ll return to my dreams in promises of a great glade that will set me free. a place to pursue her in. a place she and the others may all be free together, yet still attend my stories. she told me they wanted to hear them. she asked why i didn’t trust anyone. she asked if i’m afraid of everything or just failure. 

never mind, i return my thoughts to the wind. waves lap in the distance. somewhere, Kyomi roars. 

Dancing around a firepit, wandering through the darkness in the middle of the night, one fist clenched above the Gulf of Mexico, tear-shaken time with a friend, wildflowers in forgotten fields, laughter late at night, excruciating morning wake-ups, imitating a character currently beloved, curled into a ball with a book and a pen, creating thousands and thousands of stories…

I can’t leave it. Someone must put words to the tales. 

I open my eyes and find myself in thick woods. Someone has arranged boulders into a semi-circle, and the Sunflower Girl leans from atop the centermost. 

“Welcome to the glade, greenie.”

rooted

can i love another
like i love you?
is there anything 
i wouldn't do for you?
you ask me to love this world
the way you do, and
here i am, with arms wide open
yelling out to a stormy October sky
what i vow against to November's. 

and here are trees
and there are seas
and such is the way
for my present complaints,
to be rooted or free
two years feels like eternity,
but so does ten percent of anything. 

i've never written good poetry,
but does that still matter? does it
still matter what i write so long as 
i write? 

One hand walks the edge of the steering wheel while the other dangles out the car window, sweatless even in 100 degree heat. In the distance, stars and a red crescent moon shine, and you can still feel the arms of your hostess around you, the faint pointing upwards of, "We'll have to have you and Rebekah and Viji here in the fall. We've got a telescope we can stargaze with if you want."

Her kindness strikes you, yet more than that, her easy sense of permanence. For her, there's no doubt that she'll be here in the fall, that you'll all be here in the fall. 

It's the same with your neighbor. She has plans spanning next year and next month. She's made you her plus one for every holiday because she knows you can't afford to go home. She's allowing herself to love you, though an apartment itself says "temporary."

She's been here 48 years minus 11, the regretful time she moved to Iowa. Almost everything terrible that's happened to her happened in Iowa. She came back home for her father, and even now she's grappling with the realization that not everything at home is permanent. The times has changed faster than she has, and she remembers when the Kwik Trip on Old PB - which is called M now - was the first of its kind in the city. She remembers when the apartment she lives in now was built in the fields she played in as a kid, climbing through the rubble of new construction and staring up in awe at the towering buildings. 

She can't imagine a world without roots, like moving to the other side of the country where she's the lone remnant of her graduating high school class. 

You surprise her sometimes, with your flitting about. She doesn't understand how you get lost so easily, your penchant to talk about home, to embrace the heat like its the summer blanket you forgot how badly you needed. Yet you do. She raises her love for home in glass displays and wonders why others exist. 

Every day for three weeks, you passed a carousel painted red. It meant nothing to you besides a novelty, an interesting piece for a workplace to have. Yet the first time your neighbor lays eyes on the sight, she cries, remembering the days it was stationed on the other side of town, and she'd welcome in spring on the painted wings of its steel dragons. 

They all gather around and wonder at you, your plucky grin. They whisper to each other as you pass that it won't be long now, and you'll be gone. 

These are the moments she'll remember the rest of her life. 

Her neighbor's face lit by fire held close and a shaking cigarette, from the third box of the day. An addiction rendered beautiful in flickering orange at burnt twilight. 

Or the secret place at the top of the roof, with a guitar and a Bible and the open stars. She keeps waiting for someone to notice her up here and call the police, or at least wave hello. Instead, it's just her and her song and the neighbor's voices, coming together in the timeworn language of the neighborhood north. 

Or dinner with friends singing for her. Two candles - one for each decade - blown out only after she wishes that she might never lose these friends. 

A phone passed around the circle with old friends and new ones together, wishing happy birthday for a friend far away.

He searches for the perfect name, pointing out street signs and writing down the names of his coworkers' kids. Somewhere around here, he'll find the inspiration, something beautiful for his daughter. He wants it to be perfect, the first gift he gives her, one that will stay with her for all her life.

His other two daughters help, throwing out names that come to mind. 

"Lauren!"

"Elizabeth!"

"Kylie." 

He hesitates on the K, a name to match his daughters. Their names both mean pure and start with K, and he likes the idea. Not Kylie, but something else?

The answer comes at church, when one of the kids from Sunday school runs through him by accident, and he leaps out of the way as his youngest shouts her name, "Kaitlin, come back!" 

"Kaitlyn," he says. It fits. 

It too means pure. 

He doesn't tell anyone at first, turning the name over in his mind again. With his last daughter, he hadn't known until he stood above her and saw it in her eyes. Still, though, it had fit. 

This time, he knew before he saw her. 

The other women in his family keep proposing ideas.

"Clara."

"Rebekah."

"Rylie." 

His oldest rushes in one day, shouting in glee. "I've got it! Her name's going to be Olivia!" 

He tries it on. It fits too.

On the day he holds his youngest daughter in his arms, he doesn't cry, smiling as he pulls her close. Could any love compare to this? 

Kaitlyn Olivia.  It's her. 

His daughter. 

Years pass. Hardship grows, and easy smiles crush themselves away. His daughters age, laughing and crying and screaming and fighting and loving and learning all at the same time. Through it all, he's there. For their first steps, the jokes that make no sense, the 3am sicknesses, the late night discipline, the bedtime hugs, the music lessons, first days of school, history sessions, rising and falling friendships, religious conflict and more. 

His daughters age away from him, and he figures that means he's doing his job right, teaching his young women to be independent and sufficient. 

Then one day, Kaitlyn Olivia sends him a message, unwilling to face him with her words. They sting. 

His daughter doesn't want to be his daughter anymore. 

"Call me, my boy. Call me Ak. I hate my name," his child writes to him.

The world has told him that if he truly loves her, he'll call her a boy, he'll call her by the name she chooses. One that means powerful instead of pure. One that means individualistic over innocent. 

Over the years, he has borne many blows. The blame, accusation, and hurt of his children. He has let them sharpen their claws on him, knowing that in this way, he prepares them for a world where they will need them. He's seen them tear a family apart and denounce it for all to hear. He's seen many good gifts taken and used, then lost and broken in days. Yet through all, he has loved and loved.

Yet this? How could a father lose his daughter? 

He tells his daughter he loves her. That she will always be Kaitlyn to him. That this was the name he had given her. She didn't have to use it, but surely she could understand? How for him, there was no other name? 

Maybe she sensed the pain in his plea, and she nods. She lets him have this. 

And though she still introduces herself as Ak, she lets him call her by the name he gave her, and when he says it, she still finds it beautiful.

The child beats her fist upon titanium walls, matching her force with her heartbeat. She keeps time in this way, unrelenting even when her fist breaks open from the force. She screams, but no one hears her, locked away as she is in the darkest of places.

She wants to be free, but she doesn’t. She wants to be safe, but she doesn’t. In the absence of certainty, she lays awake, driven half to madness along the way.

She yells again, stopping her pounding just long enough to throw her chair to the other side of the room. It wasn’t worth it to love. It would never be worth it to love. 

When it doesn't work, she curls into herself again and whimpers. "I just want to be loved," she murmurs, the voice of a four-year-old. It echoes about her, a frigid refrain.