Around the block blog
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jenny yarborough
The part of you that is human seeks lust--long walks on the beach, six pack abs, white picket fence, two point three children, dog, Mercedes Benz. You swipe right after there is nothing left. Lost in the cliche, you call it love, pair it with a diamond, the American Dream...
It wasn't the sex I missed. It was touch. I missed touching her–breathing in the air she recycled from her mouth and making it mine. I missed waking up in the middle of the night to smell the hair on the top of her head right where the part divided her skull into two hemispheres...
We made a song when we played together.
Dear Billy,
I fell in love with you the first day of kindergarten. We rarely spoke but we told our friends secretly in the cafeteria that we were spoken for. I wasn't sure if you loved me back until that time we were partnered for stations. We sat there across the table like adults sipping fine wine on a first date in a foreign country if we had met in an art museum + didn't speak the same language. We took turns pushing the rainbowed, wooden beads across the stiff, metal lines of the abacus imagining we knew how to add + pretending like we were actually doing anything other than getting lost in each other's eyes through the myriad of color, the wall that provided just enough separation to comfort us...
"Jenny, come here. I need to teach you something," Coach Ray said as he called me over to the side of the practice footballfield. Earlier, I told him about how after games when the team lined up to shake hands and high five the opposing team as an action of respect, some of the guys on the other teams refused to shake my hand or throw out a high five when they got to me. Instead, they'd take my hand tightly and hold it. "It's the girl," they'd whisper to the guys behind them. I wasn't complaining to Coach. I honestly thought their reactions were amusing. I understood there would be some strangeness when molds were broken. But he took note.
Some time while I was in college (those days are a bit of a blur now that I'm the big 3-0), my pops ordered an American flag out of some sort of alt-hippie catalogue that sold rainbow patches and We-can-do-it tees. Only, this American flag didn't have any stars. In place of the 50 five-pointers was a white peace sign.
The first time I was in the news was because I had lost a tooth. It was average news, at best, for a five-year-old. I had been playing house with my baby sis in the playhouse my Pepa had built for us. "I was drinking a glass of milk and it just fell out," I told the reporter when my grandma handed me the phone trailed by a long, winding cord.
There is a brighter side of loss. In my own life–whether it was losing a race, losing hope in love, losing a career or losing a loved one–at first, I am always met with desperation. I tend to take shelter hoping that by hiding from the world, the past will dissipate like a dream. But as the tears run down my face, the hands of the clock keep ticking. There is no time to look back, ask questions. We are here now, I tell myself.
We are no different from the wild beasts of the woods. Talk to any forester and they'll tell you that at any given time there is an overpopulation of some species. It causes chaos–change. Habitats are diminished or grow wild because of just one breed. If per say there is a population increase of rabbits one year, within a few more years, naturally, there would be a decrease of rabbits due to an increase of foxes. We feed off of our differences. Balance–an organic, and most often disguised, form of peace.
