She smiles. A distinct strawberry gloss. Constantly being licked off when
nobody is looking. A luminous halo of tangled hair. Her gumball machine rings coexist with her
chipped red nail polish, chipped from playing football with the boys. In the rain, on Saturday.
Wearing her brothers T-shirt. Wearing a daisy in her hair. Walking home. Licking off her glass. She smiles
And She is beautiful.

~Brandi Vianos, Quest Literary Magazine

I think back to my lunchbox-toting days preceding the arrival of my purse. Days when I was callused to many
elements of my environment, my bare feet skittering across the desert’s rough and tortured outer layer. My playmate of choice was a boy who shared my love for apple juice popsicles, bike riding and tetherball. Day after day we would take to the deserted lots chasing each other in a fantastical world. We make up stories, created competition, challenge and danger. We named the lizards and examined jackrabbit bones. And when the sun was sucked to the horizon we knew, without complexities we would retreat to our respective homes. Day after day would end in this fashion, there was no need for an exchange of phone calls, rings, or other such assurances of friendship. There was just three words, “Can you play?” With those three words our friendship was validated and executed.

This exchange of companionship happens continually until it doesnt. Eventually my tetherball tethered only by the wind as my friend moved on to a new street, one where green grass lawns replaced the desert clay and squirrels replaced the lizards.

In my progression since those sunbaked days the simplistic expression of my interest to “play” has evoloved into an intricate and complex graph on which x and y plotted points of reality direct otherwise desire-driven lines. Compoundly more complex is the expression of not wanting to “play.”

I want to be beautiful. I want to have my red nail polish chipped from “playing football with the boys in the rain” and I want to wear a sweatshirt and a daisy in my hair. I want to laugh in waves that reverberate through my whole body. I have always found it is the small things that makes a person beautiful. I search for those who find beauty in me and I smile when I do.

I have left behind many playmates and many neighborhoods. My purse swings. Red wine substitutes apple juice popsicles, but the horizon still sucks down the sun.