They say there’s no such thing as magic.
That everything can be explained
By college textbooks
And nature documentaries
But
What do you call the swell
Of my heart when the
Sun peeks over the hills
Blanketed in dew?
Is there a scientific explanation
For how wide my eyes are
After three hours in the Met?
Can you explain
What runs through my mind
When I dive headfirst
Into water so clear and cold
That it erases my mind?
Tell me that you don’t believe in magic then.
Title inspired by Tom Robbins’ novel “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues”
Even space cowgirls get the blues
It’s lonely uniting the cosmos,
Lassoing aliens,
Being wild.
But don’t fall in love with a space cowgirl
She’ll only break your heart
With a tip of her hat
And the twinkle of stars between her teeth
She’s gone.
She’s not made for your life,
Needs space to
Fling herself off the edge
Of the world and see where
She goes.
Against the setting sun, cacti framed by flames
Beside hibiscus blooms open wide, giving their pollen away to the hummingbirds
Chickens squawking in yards filled with patchy grass and remnants of children’s toys
Down the hill, orange and brown specks that could be houses but
Easily look like brushstrokes, a painting
For sale at the art gallery in Alajuela
Grandparents, but not ours, tell us stories in Spanish
Help us understand by talking slowly and motioning with wrinkled hands
In the morning, a trip to the store on the corner where the road forks
Just us kids, sharing candy and holding up funny hats, giggling through aisles
Kicking the soccer ball that sprays up dew against our shins, avoiding the ants that sting ankles
Local mothers in work boots, faster than the varsity boys
Mango juice dripping down our chins, sickly sweet against our tongues
Napkins packed by host parents spread the stickiness
Over fingers and sunburnt faces, only to be washed off at the spigot in between water fights
Paint dries in the sun on the walls of the community center, sparkling green
Quiet is relative; here it means the constant sound of water rushing and someone singing
Rice and beans, fried plantains and and palm hearts fill our bellies as
Sunshine dries the mud into tiny canyons in the dirt road
That borders the rainforest, fends off vines that creep and monkeys that wake the town
Under the dense canopy, the air is heavy and the breeze sounds like a whisper
Vanilla and cacao, tasting bitter pulp and holding the seed between teeth
Wild dogs splash in waterfalls, perking up at the names they’ve been given
Xenia, a parting gift, a blood red flower woven into cloth, a physical reminder
Years later, will I remember this? Memories too magical to fade away
Zig-zagging, the bus pulls away and I look back, just for a second, before I turn back around
In third grade we looked at pictures of snowflakes,
Their silvery outlines stark against black
Every year we see the pictures
Until we don’t
We’re too old to experience magic, I suppose
And much too old to believe in it
There is nothing more delicate than snowflakes
And nothing stronger than our skin
Worn now like leather,
Faded and spotted by the same sun that melts
Snowflakes
The only magic that we still believe in
But snowflakes don’t fall anymore
Another instance of magic fading away
Like memories that we don’t revisit
The same sun that melted the snowflakes then
Withers the grass now
And the snow doesn’t fall, but we’re still here
Inspired by George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From”
I am from my red tricycle
From buttered peas and Norah Jones on the radio.
I am from the blood red sumac in my backyard
(Unlearned lessons of sticky hands)
I am from the railing of the stage that my dad made me;
Strong and sturdy, just like him.
I am from ravioli and eye drops,
From Pam and Norma.
I’m from bright yellow daffodils
And joyful shrieking
From emerald gardening gloves dripping with dirt.
I’m from sweet potato pies
With a side of Amen
And wrinkled hands held tight.
I’m from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and rocking horses,
Gauze butterflies and breakfast for dinner.
From stickers stuck to the roof of our Eurovan
To Webster the frog in his steamy glass case.
The plastic-wrapped scrapbooks
Under my grandpa’s loft:
Memories of Old Maid games and birthday cakes
With rainbow sprinkles.
I am from a vegetable soup family;
Thrown together and stirred and warm-
Just like we should be.
A girl and her father walk through the Met looking at ancient art while watching kids sledding through the window.
An older couple looks at two statues kissing passionately and the man says, “that’s us tonight.” His wife laughs and holds him tighter.
A woman in a colorful sweater sits with a group of kids in front of a George Seurat painting and teaches them how to sketch. She speaks to them in fluent Polish.
A little girl cries while riding her scooter through the One World Trade Center at midnight.
Two strangers bond over their shared love of Jay Z and dancing in the subway.
Alajuela
On Saturday, November 17th, I along with around 30 other schoolmates boarded a charter bus and took two planes to San José, Costa Rica for a service project & vacation. What occurred in the next eight days became the best travel experience of my life.
On Sunday, right after we arrived in Costa Rica, I ate a traditional Costa Rican lunch of rice, beans, chicken, and tortilla chips before arriving at our hotel in Alajuela, a large province slightly north of San José. The hotel, called Casa Cielo Grande, was situated further up on the mountainside with a gorgeous view of the city below. At night, the city lights flickered as we splashed in the outdoor pool. I shared a large one-room, two-bathroom house with many of the other girls in my class, along with my sister. After a few long days of traveling and sleeping in the uncomfortable bus and plane seats, I gratefully sunk into the bed and fell into a deep sleep.
Cafe Florida & “The Jungalow”
The next day my group, which was comprised of mostly seniors and juniors along with a few sophomores, took a five-hour bus ride to a sustainable coffee & cacao farm called Cafe Florida. On our way, we stopped at a bridge to see crocodiles lying in the sun and at a Costa Rican supermarket to pick up local snacks and fresh-squeezed juice.
We stopped in the mountains at a roadside restaurant with a view of the jungle; it was beautiful. Next to the restaurant was a fruit stand, and the man who worked there was very happy to show us different kinds of local fruit and even let us taste most of them. My favorite was called mamon chino. It’s pinkish and spiky on the outside, and to eat it you break it open and a round, peeled-grape-looking fruit is inside. It’s very sweet and juicy.
After a long day of driving, we arrived at Cafe Florida and met Roy Cisneros, the farm owner, along with his wife, young son, and their adorable dog, Pecan. The Cisneros family showed us around their farm and let us try cacao straight from the plant, as well as their other plants and herbs. Cafe Florida is incredible because it is almost completely sustainable and eco-friendly. The Cisneros family uses fecal matter from their pigs to power their stoves, and they eat only what they grow or buy from their neighbors. According to Mr. Cisneros, the family grows bananas, coffee, cacao, coconuts, mangos, lettuce, and many various herbs. They also raise tilapia and shrimp in their pond, keep cows for milk, chickens for eggs, and guinea pigs to be pets for their son.
After touring the farm, Roy and his family led us to their porch, where we were taught how to make empanadas and were able to try steaming hot cups of Cafe Florida coffee with fresh cow’s milk. The family’s story and their farm were so inspiring and a great reminder to support local small businesses over large corporations.
After I devoured my empanada, we headed to what we called “the jungalows,” little huts in the jungle where we spent that night. The girls discovered a nasty surprise when we realized that we had left our back door wide open all afternoon, inviting all of the bugs and jungle creatures inside. What followed was a night of screaming and panicked scrambling around the jungalow when we found numerous beetles, cockroaches, and spiders. This was the first time I learned that in Costa Rica I had to learn how to be okay with bugs.
Nauyaca Waterfall
The next morning I woke up early and headed down to breakfast with the rest of my friends. We ate rice, beans, eggs, and fresh pineapple. During breakfast, we talked to a little boy named Matias, who was the son of another local farmer. He loved seeing himself and the rest of us in our Snapchat filters, but what he loved, even more, was making fun of the way we looked with the Snapchat filters. We all had a lot of fun with Matias, even though our Spanish was pretty rusty.
After breakfast, Roy (of Cafe Florida) took my group and a bunch of dogs to the edge of their village to begin our hike down to the Nauyaca waterfall. We began our descent into the jungle, and the hike turned out to be a lot harder than I had expected it to be. The path was narrow, and most of it was muddy and slippery due to the early morning rain. I would be lying if I said that many of us didn’t slip at least once. Hiking through the jungle was a beautiful experience, and I was able to see crabs, birds, termites, and various other jungle creatures. Thankfully I didn’t encounter any snakes.
As I got closer to our destination, I could hear the roar of the waterfall. We all hurried down the rest of the hill, excited about the prospect of swimming and playing in the waterfall. The trees opened and suddenly I could see it: a large, thundering waterfall ending in a huge pool full of people swimming and splashing around on the rocks. I stripped off my shorts and shirt and ran into the water with my friends and half a dozen excited dogs. The water was warm and felt amazing after our sweaty hike, and the rain that eventually hit was an added bonus. I sat on the rocks with my feet in the water and talked to my friends, splashed water at the dogs, and jumped numerous times from a rock ledge into the water. A more thrilling part of the day was seeing some daredevil tourists climb the actual waterfall with a rope and jump off of it, doing flips and turns on the way down. After we all got our fill of swimming in the pool, we took another shorter hike to the upper level of the waterfall, where we spent time doing individual reflections and just enjoying the roar of the waterfall and the spray against our faces.
Eventually, we began our grueling hike back up to the bus. Going up was, in a way, easier than going down, because the risk of slipping was minimal. However, it was very steep and it had gotten hotter since our morning hike. As we got to the top of the hill, our leaders JP and Travis told us that the bus had gotten stuck five miles away and we had to walk to it. I was about to just give up and take a nap, but thankfully it was a (cruel) joke, and we boarded the bus and headed to San Salvador, where we would meet our host families.
By the time we meet the sun is reaching towards the lake, making the air hazy and golden. We walk the break wall, our toes bending against the sharp edges of the grey rocks, slapping mosquitoes from our legs and pulling them through the strands of our hair. Left on the flat rocks near the beach are two pairs of Birkenstocks and a carton of fresh, warm strawberries, blood red like the sky. Eventually the bugs overtake us and we retreat to the rough sandpaper of the roadside, shoes in one hand and strawberries in the other.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
The stars rush by as I swing. Facing the opposite way I always did, on my childhood playground. I feel like I’m falling into the Milky Way. Then I’m sitting on the damp seat of the jungle gym, trying to relearn childhood climbing tricks. Feeling out of place, realizing that I am no longer the person who climbed these things. Thinking about how different it will be.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
We take a long walk through the golf course, feet slick with water from the sprinkler, sliding along the shorn grass of the green. The roar of the dam is deafening as we walk across the bridge and through the Falling Waters Lodge. We run as we try to scare each other, pretending we see the Merc’s resident raccoon. Now we’re lying on the cool sand of Van’s Beach. And there is only this moment, no other.
THE PRESENT
The first thing that registers in my mind is yellow. I don’t know why, but my mind fills with the color. Almost as if someone poured pure sunshine straight into the center of my heart. My body feels warm. I open my eyes to see a ray of sun illuminating the swirls of dust floating across the bedroom. I love nothing more than these mornings, when the slats of the blinds create tilting stripes on the bedsheets and the shrieking of my alarm is absent.
His warm breath shifts the hair on my neck, tickling the sensitive area below my ear. I grin, turning towards him and planting my soft lips against his warm ones. His lips, his cheeks, his forehead, his neck. He groans, shifting slightly towards me, his arms snaking around my waist. I study his groggy face for several seconds. Like a map of his life, my eyes seek out the scar on his eyebrow from when he fell off of a chair when he was five. I look at the ruddy red mark on his jaw, where my lips tattooed a rose on his face the night before. I look at his eyelashes, long and feathery against his tanned cheeks.
“Morning,” his voice is scratchy, clashing with the early morning softness in his grey cloud eyes. He still looks asleep, his mouth pouting, then stretching into the smile I know oh so well. And I lose track of time, like I always do, as Nina Simone plays softly on the radio.
Maybe it was seconds later, maybe hours, maybe only minutes that I lay beside him, legs tangled in the bright white hotel sheets. The blinking clock on my right reads 11:38 am. I blow my bangs out of my eyes.
“We should get going, it’s getting late.”
“At this rate, we won’t even reach Sedona until next week.” He chuckles softly, not sounding sorry at all.
“It’s your own fault, you know.”
“As it always is.”
“Shut it.”
“Rude, now make it up to me.” He leans in, all minty breath and sparkling eyes and freckled cheeks and how could I say no, and before I knew it it was 2 in the afternoon.
“Will, we have to leave now!”
“See,” he says lazily, looking up at me from the bed, “the thing about not having a schedule is that you’re supposed to be relaxed. Relaxed, you’ve heard of it, haven’t you?”
“Let’s go!”
“Alright, be patient woman.”
We drove through the night, the stars rushing by overhead, the universe singing its song of silence as the city fell blissfully asleep behind us. The headlights lit up the desert, casting shadows of cacti and tumbleweeds against the harsh clay cliffs.
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere. Everywhere.”
“Well, let’s go then.”
“Yes, let’s.”
And we did. And when the sun escaped from the horizon that held it captive all night, it fell onto our smiling eyes and lips and it was satisfied.
THE NEXT MORNING
Have you ever had that feeling like those twinkly Christmas lights were packed tight inside of your chest cavity? And you feel like you could burst from the electricity of it all. Like you were listening to the deafening climax of your favorite song, only it was happening on repeat, and every time your heart beats a little faster. Yeah, that’s how the inside of my old Subaru felt.
“What’re you thinking about, prettygirl?” His hand slid from the wheel to my folded hands, his fingers brushing like sun rays across my palms. The Christmas lights in my heart seemed to twinkle a little brighter.
“I’m just…I feel obnoxiously happy.” A laugh burst from his chest. It was bright pink, like the rain boots currently strewn across the backseat. “Seriously, I might start to annoy myself if I keep this up. I feel like I’m living my favorite word.”
“You’re living zenith?”
“How did you know my favorite word was zenith?”
“You told me. On our very first date, remember?”
And I did.
THREE YEARS EARLIER
“Are you,” I paused. I couldn’t remember his name.
“Will Jewell. And you’re Hadley Jameson, right?” Of course, ultrahandsome guy remembers my name.
“Yeah, sorry. My memory and I aren’t the best of friends. She gives just as much as she takes away.”
“I’m sure I can get her to remember me. I’m very memorable.” He smirked, and suddenly my brain was all pearls and chocolate and gold.
11:39 pm, and instead of curled beneath a heavy blanket of crappy TV and coffee gelato I’m at a 24 hour coffee shop with the boy with the chocolate eyes that I’d only met today. And instead of discussing the latest Olivia Pope drama with my cat, I’m trading favorites like baseball cards, tossing my secrets recklessly across the smooth tabletop.
“Favorite movie?”
“That’s easy,” I say. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” A long pause ensues.
“You’re…very unpredictable, I must say.”
“I’ve gotta keep you on your toes somehow, right?”
“Right.”
“Alright…favorite dessert?”
“Oh pumpkin pie, no question. Favorite word?”
“Favorite word?”
“C’mon, everyone has one.”
“That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.” That’s what I said. What I wanted to say was you just read my heart.
He stands up and I grab my purse and our glances clash like silver swords as we step into the inky dark air. I watch his feet leave invisible footsteps on the concrete as he walks to his car.
“Hey, Will.”
“Yeah?”
“My favorite word? Zenith. It means-“
“I know exactly what it means. I’ll see you later, prettygirl.”
I was in for it.
THE PRESENT
“You still remember that? After-“
“All this time? Of course I do. I ask that question on every date I go on. You’re the only girl I’ve met who actually told me a word I didn’t know.”
“Wait! You told me-“
“I wasn’t about the embarrass myself in front of such a pretty girl, was I? Besides, I have a track record with words, remember. I know them all.”
“You DID have a track record with words. But that was before-“
“I met you.”
His words ricochet against the windows, lit white by my warm breath. They clang against the solid glass until finally settling in my lap. The silence of the endless road could have gone on for hours-
I was jarred by the rumbling of gravel beneath the car tires, stark in comparison to the smooth worn highway. Will slams his foot against the brakes, my hands crack against the dashboard, and the roar of the engine quiets. Someone screams during all of this and it slices through the night sky. I realize that someone was me.
“Hadley! Are you okay?”
“What the hell just happened?”
“I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to be so…abrupt. I just need to tell you something. Well, ask, more like but…”
“Spit it out, Will.”
“Look, Hadley. I thought of all of the big words I would use when I said this, words like elysian or epiphany or metanoia. But right now, only one word comes to mind. Redamancy.”
TWO AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER
“Pancakes with chocolate chips, just the way you like them.”
“You’re perfect. You only forgot one-“
“Coffee? I could never forget to give you your lifeblood. That would just be cruel.”
“Like I said, perfect.”
“And I love you.”
I had always thought the phrase “deafening silence” was an obvious oxymoron until this exact moment, when the lack of voices in the room was louder than the washing machine on laundry day.
“…what…uh, what did you just say?”
“I love you, Hadley. So much.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
His breath caught on the fishhook in his throat and it turned his eyes red.
“Reciprocation would be a great choice.”
“I just…you surprised me.”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it does!”
Wrong answer.
“No, it doesn’t.”
His sigh blew the walls of the house in, leaving me standing in the middle of it all with nothing but the dust.
His back rose and fell, causing the patterns on his comforter to morph into triangles and circles and guilt. I stuck the sticky note against his wall, covering the gash I made on a day involving chocolate cake and frisbees. Redamancy. The act of loving in return.
THE PRESENT
“Will, what are you doing?” My voice quavered, my tongue a tangle of leaves in the wind.
“Just- just wait. Redamancy. It means the act of loving in return. You gave me that word once, when I needed it most. And now I’m giving it back to you, a thousand and two times over. I promise you redamancy forever. I promise you redamancy when we’re old and we wear adult diapers and our eyes are too bad to see the lines on the road. I promise you redamancy when you’re grumpy and I’m frustrated and our favorite songs aren’t enough anymore.”
“Will!”
“Just wait.”
*to be continued*
– J.S.
