"the board"

                                                       
*1

I was 17 and the world was black and orange.

The black kept me safe. The orange made me wake up at sunrise. My headphones kept me happy. I could sit in a lotus position for hours.

Under railroad tracks, with the sun down, we sat.
"Maria," the boy said."One day I'll build you a temple."
He read from a napkin, his fingers shaking,

"I painted a picture in my mind
of a bizarre love kind
the room was swarthy
my father screamed-"

"Wait, why did he scream," I asked
"What difference does it make," he answered sadly.

We went to his house. His father made us coffee. I gave his parents a bag of rice. I thought their boy was hungry. They had a nice house in the suburbs. The door was pink. He was pink. His tongue was pink. His mind was black. He bought oranges and never ate them.

"The door is salmon," he corrected me once.
"A salmon is a fish," I replied.

He gave me some pieces of paper. They were folded, different colors, from a recycled notebook. He said, "I just think if you want to write, you should give it a try sometime. You'd probably be really good at it. Like when you talk, you know?"

On Earth Day, we sang songs while the environmentalists marched by, dressed in black. We watched the sun go down and saw a man blow fire from a stage. He grabbed my hands, said, "Let's go!"

"I can't dance!" I screamed
"That's a lie!" he laughed. He pulled me into the mosh pit, and I painted black and blue stamps across other kids' faces with my hands.

"Ummm, that's not quite the point of a mosh pit," he wrote me in a postcard from Somewhere Plausible.

I took his skateboard once. I cut his grip tape into tiny stars and jagged lines. I added small stickers of kittens and anarchy symbols.. just to see if he would notice.

"The marmalade cats are nice," he replied. "I think anarchy is for p*****s."

His eyes were hazel. His hair was dark brown. When he grew a beard, kids called him Jesus. The Birkenstock sandals didn't help. His skin always smelled like he just rolled around in clay. 

I wore grey Girbaud jeans with purple and tan stripes and matched it with a burgundy work shirt and a Captain's uniform jacket. My hair tended to knot in dreads and I dyed it indigo on my 19th birthday. He told me I looked nice. I stopped buying designer jeans when I had to start paying rent.

"Did I ever tell you about the time your sister took me out for breakfast? It was before she told you she hated me. She bought a glass of orange juice and said it was sunshine in a glass."

"I don't believe you," I told him.
"You never do."

"Maria," the boy said. "One day I'll build you a temple."
He did. Often. He liked to build it up, then burn it down. Repeat to the point of neurosis.





*2

I'm sitting across the man who blew fire on a stage once, back when I was a teenager. My coffee is black, because I'm too lazy to ask for milk and sugar. He's drinking sunshine in a glass.

I share these things. He nods, holds my hands.

 He knows I refuse to hear anything about skateboards anymore. He also knows I won't drink orange juice anymore without a shot of vodka in it.

"Can't I just tell him you said hello?" he implores me.
"No...I want our bad poem to stop."