June and a tangerine
It is June and I wake in pieces of children- the children I won’t have, the child I won’t see again. I have been sentenced to thirteen weeks of yearning for a past version of myself that never existed and a red and peeling sunburn across my back for the hitchhiker and his son that I drove past on the way to the beach earlier this month. Today summer snowed flies and pollen and the trees sweated all over the pavement and made the soles of my shoes stick to the ground.
It is June: June is down to the pith, picking out strands of porous skin from the little earth she holds in her left hand. The air is filling with sweet and pungent threads of nectar.
Sisyphus, picking up her boulder: June unpeeled three tangerines at the first signs of light, plucking each of them apart turn by turn, segment by segment, strand by strand, not eating- just gently sliding the pieces across her lips while she looked out across the people passing below. Today the skin is fresh: the flesh bursts easily, covering June’s lips in thick insides- little white intestines dangling from her mouth. Segment after segment, her lips grow sticky and slightly sharp. If only her lips were always as smooth as the shell casing of a tangerine: if only her skin were so sweet: if only she were able to be manufactured and modified: to be perfect at all times: to be bought and sold and pierced and peeled and consumed so readily. June is thinking about death and receding and how little she seems to have grown.
If only she were a fruit. If only she were a bird. Why did God have to afflict her with this: this: an existence rationed into thirty-day pieces: she could be anyone else- anything else. There is an awful lot of emptiness. Big and bright and hanging in the sky like a bird tethered to the clouds. Big funny pink thing in the sky. The more she stares at it, the less it hurts her eyes but rather calls her forward- beckoning June to chase after it, run, run until she’s right underneath it, right below the coils of arms and legs that fray from the sun. Icarus taught her better than to try.
Icarus, too close to some slight change: she scoops up all of the little pieces collecting at her toes and stuffs them all in her mouth- eating the warmth, the pollen, the snow, tomorrow, this shame, this hope: gone with a swallow. The pieces burst and drip down her chest and onto her knees.
Lightning and thunder and sticky rain tight on the skin and turning fresh clothing damp and sweaty. June feels odd. She should be willing it forward: running towards July. And yet she doesn’t want tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow. She doesn’t want next year or a haircut. She doesn’t want solstice or solace. Not to be in love or be alone. She doesn’t want to sleep: she doesn’t want to speak. She wants to dance and to weep and to cry a whole thirty days more. She wants so much and nothing at all. June can’t decide which ambition to pursue: to disappear or to be written into memory: to rain right the month through or to stand aside for the sun like she has no alternative. There is time still to be: to be a bird, to be the rain, to walk and to walk and to walk until leaving herself behind and becoming something entirely different: to turn a tangerine into a grapefruit. Perhaps she may never be capable of winter or warmth or rain. Perhaps nobody is: everybody just gets on with it- falls in love, puts on mascara, laughs loudly: lives anyway. Despite life- to spite it: spit lemon juice right back at life’s eyes: stuff the pips up its nose, drink the juice of a tangerine instead.
