come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

What you can’t bear
carry endure lift
you’ll have to drag

i have been dragging it with me everywhere. in a small hatchback car, traversing interstates east and west. whatever it is, this bitterness, my very pores are steeped in it. in my carry-on, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific. what will it take, to erase it? on my shoulders, up the stairs to a top floor apartment. it was a bad dream i woke up from. dragged, everywhere i go, leaving scuff marks on the floor. dragged on the streets of foreign cities, i introduced them to this acrimony. the anger i feel is still electric, it makes my nails protract. i have been gone so long. i have lived so many hours. we are all still babies, with embryonic hearts. i don’t know. if i don’t say the name, will it go away? if i get far away enough, to never think of it again? can i make the story evaporate. axe it out of my guts. one day, i will walk down the boulevard and not feel the memories being pelted at me from every blade of grass. when it is over. when is it over.

now.

sometimes, she says, you just want to hurt someone.

so, my puerile dalliance as a blonde is over. it lasted six days. i don’t feel bad about it, even if my hair is now light brown with a hue of stayed-in-the-pool-too-long. i have never been known for my circumspect hair coloring choices, having spent most of my teenage years with a deep red bob and most of last year with a series of haphazard black streaks across the top layer of my hair. blonde is the only color i’ve never had the courage to try. ‘you were blonde as a little girl,’ my mom would remind me. she would derisively tell me, ‘that dark dye you put on your hair looks like shoe polish.’ she was more than happy to brush the bleach on my hair, layer by later, but she laughed so hard when she saw me after i’d rinsed the solution out, the kind of laugh where no sound comes out and you have to hold on to the doorframe to keep yourself from falling down. it was funny at first. it was not the beautiful pure blonde hair that even some of the darkest-haired adults have as children. i saw myself in the mirror, it was not me. i didn’t mind it when i would look at myself in the mirror on my car’s sun visor, with my sunglasses on, covering up my decidedly black eyebrows. i didn’t mind it when the orange tones were muted by the nighttime darkness, i didn’t mind it when i would do something stupid at work and could joke, well, i’m blonde now! i was waiting for a light that i could see myself, and know that i wanted to keep it that way. my big joke was, let’s see if my hair being this color gets me more dates. or, dates. now i will never know, but i think i can guess.

i was a lot of things when i was a little girl, but not now.