Lip-Gloss Pink
I had to hit that moment. Because so many of us don’t understand. Because so many of us forget. My body stiff, my hair flowers that haven’t seen the sun for a while. A filigree of frost on the window. Quick. Faster. The hardened snow I speed by strangely glowing like flashlights for me. I run but that vehement wind rakes through my hair and numbs and burns my face and I’m an idiot for not taking my gloves—Ow..ow—I cannot feel my cheeks—my breath raspy, not cadenced and too jagged; mucus hindering my respiration; my heart in a frenzy. And then I can no more. I balk though the wind pushes me and I slip on the frosty grass and fall splayed like a fallen star. My chin lies on the ground and I’m level with the residues of autumn’s bounty--tufts of tussocky grass with shafts erect as if electrified, behatted with bulbs of frozen dew. And up, it seems infinitely above me, willows lean like humpbacks with the weight of hardened snow as feathery branches skim the frozen lake. All gripped by winter’s static beauty. I look up at the sky---almost time. The nearest willow I climb with red and flaky hands using the fissures and knots in the squat bole to heave myself up. I curse again for not taking my gloves because my hands are so sore while my butt crashes down on the brushwood that accumulated here, right between the main boughs. My knee is grazed and bleeding. But finally I see….yes this is the in-between-time, so ephemeral, a couple breaths before dawn, when the world seems indecisive to wake. And I think about those girls who don’t know they can wait. The lipstick and the strange airs too. The sleepless nights, the blank stare from the computer, the endless betrayals and fights. For all they know the dawn breaks in the end and nothing else matters. But a teen is in-between and that’s what they don’t understand. And I, fascinated, watch the dying of the night. I sit pressed against the tree’s heart and I imagine it speaking to me, telling me the way its leaves catch the rising sun, the way it feels when water seeps up its roots and how wonderful it may feel to hear, perched upon a twig the song of a little bird.





Dawn breaks; the city awash with mascara-spider shadows and lip-gloss pink, and the in-between moment is gone.