There’s a rainbow in my living room.
It flies along the walls, as if lost in the dance of an insane child.
And it reminds me. Reminds me of a twelve year old girl, decked out in colors attempting to imitate that flawless presence of the rainbow chuckling across the cream walls of our old, dusty smelling house. A twelve year old girl, so desperate to be noticed that she stripped that small glimmer of joy of itself and painted her face with it, smeared it in her hair and in her clothes. It soaked into her soul until she was convinced that when she walked, her adolescent feet would squish out brightly colored mud, the kind that oozes down your knuckles and reminds everybody that someone was here. And that . . . that was her fight. That was her way of telling everybody, “Look! Here I am! See me!”
That was her struggle against the moths trying to eat her candle light.
That was the struggle of a twelve year old against the voices in her ears every night when the lights went out, biting off little pieces of her that would fall through her sheets and into the musty shadows of the darkness beneath her bed, to collect in piles of soul colored dust to remind her that even in the heartache, even in the lies knit into her conscience by the sardonic blue glow of a TV screen, even in the times when her flame burned the candle down to a thumbnail, even when she wanted to melt into a puddle of fire and bones, mixing with the rainwater running down her driveway and into the storm drain, she fought.
She fought like a twelve year old, crying out, screaming not with her lips but with something a superficial group of sixth graders would see.
Something found in the insane dance of a rainbow on a twelve-year-old’s wall.
Yes, there’s a memory on my wall. A memory that only exists for the time the sun reflects off of the wind-chimes outside. A memory gathered in the flock of dust bunnies beneath my bed. A memory scattered in the minds of used-to-be sixth graders.
A memory of a twelve year old who painted the world on the backs of cynical newspapers slipped beneath her door, a twelve year old who hated tomatoes, but loved spaghetti sauce.
A memory of someone I used to be.
A memory disguised as a rainbow.