Then There Was Pink

Come, come, whoever you are.

Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.

It doesn't matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vow

a thousand times

Come, yet again, come, come.

--Rumi



Pink and Rumi should have been childhood friends. Pink had come from Richmond, Virginia and had grown up, like Rumi, in a religion that not only taught her mantras like "be no part of the world," but threatened her with severe penalties should she ever become part of the world. She didn't want to be like other girls who betrayed their families and friends, and worst of all, God and lived meaningless lives. Pink was determined to be different. If this wasn't enough, Pink was a military base child, only staying in one school long enough to meet a couple new interesting people her age before moving on to the next one.

Rumi had grown up primarily in St. Louis, but, like Pink, had already lived in several different places by the time he was five, although Rumi was not a military-base kid. Rumi would never have lived on a military base, for he was politically neutral, and though curious about the outside world, he grew up thinking of himself as priveleged to be uninfected by what the rest of the world was doing.

Until he was five, Rumi was an only child, and spent his lazy days looking for fossils in his grandparents' country gravel driveway in Missouri, looking for crawdads in the canal off the dirt road at his other grandparents' house in California, or, for another instance, on the school bus pretending to write in his notebook in cursive, clutching it close to himself to keep others from seeing his wise and mysterious writings. At these times, Rumi imagined himself to be an archaeologist, an explorer, a writer. But although these were his pasttime careers, Rumi mainly considered himself, if he considered himself anything, a philosopher.

He wouldn't see just the gum stuck to the back of the seat in front of him on the schoolbus, or hear just the rumbles and awkward squeaks of the bus and the background chatter of those "worldly" highschoolers who kept to themselves in the back of the bus. In that gum, Rumi would see the teeth-marked pinkish purple texture that gave the gum its gumness, and his eyes might've drifted, if he stared long enough, as sometimes he would, to etch marks that had scraped down past the surface green faux leather seatback to reveal just plain white. And these etch marks, though apparently random, would seem to make clowns and fishermen and all sorts of funny characters, and then, a question would pop in his head, a question of circumstance, just a simple question, that would turn into however many questions needed to be answered before he knew a perfect answer.

What is green? A color. The seatback. The maples. The telephone poles outside the window, while the bus passed, with drooping black cords, conduit to voices, connecting them, twisted with rain, like grass blades. These tree poles, his own arm he imagined throwing down, one at a time, or hopping over, as they passed. The speed mesmerized him, that he could be sitting down, viewing his arm in his own mind stretching through the window like Stretch Armstrong (although he hadn't been invented yet), yet moving fast enough to blur the fields, the frayed wire fences, the old wooden barns and houses with monstrous satellites in the yards, the telephone poles in the foreground. One. At. A. Time.

What is green (how to connect green with blurring. . .)? Rumi explored green. Greens. Greenery. The seatback was green. A dark jungle green? Or was it pine green? He flipped through his imaginary rolodex of Crayola colors. Definitely, there were many variations on green. What made it confusing was that green was something Rumi knew was only called green by adults, adults in America. Green was something seen. Green seen. Clean green. Something seen. Green, green. Mister clean. Clean. (telephone pole, please. thank you.) Green.

*****

Pink lived next door. But Rumi didn't know it. It was only for 3, almost 4 months.

"Where are you going, young lady?" Pink's mom, a young lady herself, asked, without realizing the irony.

"Outside."

"Oh, no you don't. Not with that dress I just bought you. And what's that in your hand? Is that. Come back here."

Pink said, "It's mine." And she spoke the truth. In her hand was a locket. It had come from her Ukrainian grandmother, her father's mother. Mamama told Pink if she could take good care of it, if she could promise this, then she could have it as her own to pass on to her own daughter some day. Perhaps Pink's mom disputed Pink's ability to care for anything. Perhaps Pink's mom didn't have a high regard for five-year-olds, and, in any case, she certainly didn't think they deserved to be the keepers of lockets.

"She's only five," Pink's dad used to say, playfully in her defense when she fucked up. She used to hear this, too. Fucked up.

"You're such a fuck-up!" he said under his breath. Only Pink heard. Pink's mom was in the kitchen with her headphones on, doing dishes. Pink didn't think her mom was a fuck-up. She thought everyone had potential, even her dad.

*****

Up-chuck. This was a word Rumi learned while sick once, as in, "Come on. You're gonna up-chuck and then you're gonna feel all better."

His mom was standing over him, over the toilet, while he kneeled, poised, ready, to up-chuck. The light was making his head hurt, and his mind spinned with his eyes closed, thinking of up-chuck. Eyes open for just a second, to examine the rim of the toilet bowl, a view Rumi never had before, and didn't quite want to be having, an up-close-and-personal view of the toilet, a string of spit gew he felt inclined to let fall, hanging from his quivering lips, induced by the smell of Lysol and urine, and the reflection of the white vanity lightbulbs above the mirror, as he kneeled upon the dirt-worn toilet rug only meant for feet.

Eyes closed and swaying, afraid he might collapse face down into the toilet spittal water, swaying forward and back, as his mom swayed side to side, saying, "That's it. Come on, you'll feel better." Next to Rumi in his right side peripheral vision, his mom's bare toes of one foot wiggled, the pink polish on four out of five nails, the pinky being alone, isolated, while the others had weathered paint jobs, like the tool shed out back that hadn't been painted in his lifetime.

Rumi wanted to get it out. He wanted to up-chuck. A chill rattled his bones. A speck of something, a gnat? a piece of lint? jossled that malleable pool in rings outward. Why couldn't it just come out? If, after these gruelling minutes without sleep, without up-chucking, he went to bed just like that, this moment would be meaningless.

The water swayed, as one liquid organism, at sea. His mom swayed, her toes wiggled. Rumi's mind pushed his whole body forward.

"Just think of that warm bed. Come on, Rumi. Just let out and get it over with," his mom said, telling him what was in his mind, without knowing, apparently, that it was Rumi's thought and not her own. This irritated Rumi. Enough that he finally let go, up-chucking right into that water, the bitter taste of stuff he chucked up: Corn Pops, Seven Up, a little homemade chicken soup, water, with just enough sweetness to make it the grossest thing he had ever tasted.

His throat hurt, but his stomach felt better. There was relief. He could stand up. "See? There." Reassuring, but condescending, and Rumi overlooked it whatever it was, because, being way past his bedtime, all he wanted was to be warm, tucked up into those cold blankets, the frost and blackberry thorns scraping at his window, to dream of past lives and future greatness.