Strings Attached

Reconsidering Yellow

25 Reconsidering Yellow She obsessed as if she were a pantoum, repeating the first and third lines of her life. For a while she was unsure of the first so she improvised, deciding between: The girl with curls skipped blithely in the sun-dotted dress her father bought in Venezuela. Or: Children who are mistreated often choose a life of crime. The third line she took from Josephine Hart’s book, Damage. “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.” Though it wasn’t clear to whom they are dangerous until she researched gray areas for psych about suicide being homicide turned inward, and vice versa. Her father left when she was seven, dislodging her inner compass and triggering fear of abandonment. It was as if every road faded to black, prompting her to define agoraphobia as: Best to stay put should he ever return. For the second line, she referred to a passage from Gibran’s Prophet: “Your children are not your children; they are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” This inspired her to consider brighter colors, study art history, and write: When I was young, I hated yellow / but after carrying the sea on my back, / blue weighed me down and I realized how heavy / salt really is. It meant she chose hunger over thirst and admired bigshouldered men. Unfortunately, her line, I licked the salt from every animal to find the taste of you again added extra weight mid stanza. Later, it was all about maps and manners. Please and Thank You this. Fuck You that. She imagined 26 dining with Prince Charles after reading about the importance of etiquette at their dinner table. She hated the cacophony of clinking spoon against melamine plate, could never imagine herself at a noodle bar in Japan. The slurping, she thought, might cause her to pick up an errant chopstick and insert it into someone’s left ventricle. It happened at family dinners— the urge, especially when serving fresh tomato marinara over capellini al dente. End stanza. She was through with red. If you dine with the queen there are rules. Once Her Majesty finishes, all forks down . . . it’s a long list. Point is, the girl could not wrap her mind around purple as a symbol for blue bloods, though it made sense as the bruised metaphor for black sheep. Familial tension forced her on all fours one Christmas, crawling around Aunt Emma’s violet shag to the beat of tachycardia during a full-blown panic attack. This, after her brother Todd breaks one of Auntie’s antique goblets, then deliberately cuts his hand on a shard before Mother could scold him. Segue from sacrificial lamb trope to impromptu alliteration: sinner, suffering, stigmata. By the last stanza the girl reconsiders yellow, a color she’s come to regard as the bright subtext of her pantoumesque journey, that which repeats—like the circles on the sun-dotted dress her father brought back from Venezuela. ...