Hush.

The sun turns her body florid. It cauterizes the guilt that hemorrhages within her conscience. But a ruddy gold burns there on the surface as if her misdeeds leak through her pores. She tries to settle her face, lips set at a bow of indifference. She tries to pass by reflective object without looking, because she is afraid of a reflection she will not recognize, transparent and barren, lids half open, eyelashes swiped into quotation mark curves. Her clavicle settles just below her skin, a slant leading to the center of her chest, a place where her heart used to hover, quivering, palpitating, plump with blood, lifelines of arteries, an ornament of life; waiting, just waiting in its steady rhythm for someone to stir its monotonous beat.

She remembers being touched and in its absence her body aches for it. It is too easy to forget the rhapsody released from a thumb tracing the little slopes your knuckles make, in a hand placed over your own like the wing of a bird around its young.

*

She wonders who she would be in the time of Jane Eyre, how a man such as Rochester would see her in depth of night between the shadows of candlelight that tremble with invisible drafts. Her hair, freed from the woven thicket pulled severely from her face in the blanched light of day.

Her mane of hair, the color of wheat forgotten after harvest in the autumn, would fall across her cheek, shielding her left eye from having to look a man straight in the face. Men would favor woman like her in the after hours, the looseness of her dressing gown, a loose braid laid over her shoulder, strands floating near the curve of her neck that meets her shoulder, dancing there like the flame on dwindling candles. Night liberates the sumptuousness that has been contained in the crosshatching of her corset and the fastening of garters in the morning.

He would place a small violet in her hair, beside her ear, but does not speak of his trance she has left him in. The night wavers in the candlelight. She fears she will loose him in the day to the woman whose skin is softened by the lack of labor and elements of the earth, the lack of sleep in the night she has been exposed to.

She tells him he is not to be trusted.

She knows they have all turned their heads in her direction for a reason.

Equinox

Fall:

Mornings and evenings bring a draft that nips at your bare skin just enough for a sweatshirt borrowed from someone like him, loose in the armpits and neck, in the places where a mans’ bulk fills the empty space that you leave empty. The sleeves ease past your lithe fingers, nails kept short and plain, unpainted, except for a clear topcoat. As a child you crept into your parents closet and nuzzled your father’s flannel shirts that he nestled into after work. You loved the feeling of swimming in plush fabric that smelled familiar and comfortable. You retrieve those articles of pilled clothing, faded in places and perhaps a little stretched out, from boys who toss them to you from folded pile or heap on the floor. And when they aren’t looking you hold the cuffs up to your nose and inhale the scent of fabric softener and old cologne. You love the smell of men and fall leaves through an open window.

And the sun burnishes saturating the earth with a dulled warmth left over from summer, the air, crisp as the bite of a ripe apple, teeth gnashing at the rouged skin to get to the lush center. The colors are incandescent in the middle of the day, those sharp wafts of air reminding us of change. Our senses reawakened.

September reminds us of the beauty in simple un-adornment. Left over russet skin from summer afternoons, still glowing around the edges, an old photograph or news clipping, touched only by a few swipes of mascara and lip balm, letting your face peer through the smattering of freckles that can be seen if someone was in deep conversation with you, inches from your neck or cheek. Fall reminds us of the innate beauty, forgotten with our youthful sincerity.

And these days you’d rather remember this way, closing your eyes against the sun and inhaling roasting coffee, turmeric and colors shifting before you.

Summer:

It came with the rain. You were glad to be situated on a campus perched atop a hill, because, if nothing else, you looked out over the trees and the grassy practice fields, above it all for once, and no one could pluck you off that higher place. It felt like home up there even in the swampy humidity of Midwest July that left an opalescent veil on everything. We were like sea creatures in a tidal pool. The mornings blazed early into the afternoon, then pluming clouds that progressed into gray as if shaded repeatedly by a charcoal pencil. Then, a cool lick of air behind your ear in late afternoon as you wandered back towards your dorm. You paused near the cement steps and watched the tops of the trees sway and fluttering like the fabric of a skirt. The atmosphere suspended around you. For a moment you think someone lingers at your back having, but you turn and only the unlit lamppost greets you, a few wrappers come to rest at its base. You descend onto the steps that hovered over the practice fields below and follow the clouds that dart a crossed the sky, grumbling as the shadows around you disappear with the sun.

And the sky opens up.

You watched the rain come in perforated sheets a crossed the land. You reach out a few inches and feel the droplets lap at your fingers. The smell of rain sweet like a new bar of soap just dampened by a hot shower. And you did not bother to move, the rain, making ellipse on the pavement, coming harder, slicking your t-shirt to your breasts. And it was warm and still. As if the world jut shared a secret and you drank it in. The rain slowed. You stood there dripping and alive.