I am holding my breath. The library’s exterior looks the same fifteen years later and I wonder if I do too. The interior has been remodeled, vending machine discarded. My old hiding place in the basement no longer exists. But I do. Perhaps I am a library. Perhaps my body is a library.
The skyline springs up overnight, obscuring all views of the bay.
It is easy to forget that you still live in a seaport town when construction cranes light up the sky, casting phosphorescent threads the colors of my teenage hair.
purple pink green and blue
float like bioluminescent filaments
invasive orchid species
illiterate neon ads
dilating the dark canvas
of the night’s sky.
“It’s not only gender, but the 12 years of Catholic school and being trained to be a good servant. I believe in this, I really believe that the greatest thing you can do is to serve […] Oh, if I could free myself from the tyranny of good deeds, […] there would be no stopping me. I could be Tolstoy without good deeds. I could really be something.” -Ann Patchett
In research for a writing assignment, I came across the etymology for narwhal.
Its name is derived from the Old Norse word nár, meaning “corpse”, in reference to the animal’s greyish, mottled pigmentation, like that of a drowned sailor[6] and its summer-time habit of lying still at or near the surface of the sea (called “logging”).[7] The scientific name, Monodon monoceros, is derived from the Greek: “one-tooth one-horn”.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal