She exists in the bite of chlorine, when all the assignments have been submitted and it is safe to be enveloped in glowing, eclectic blue. She swims in skies of chemicals. She’s balanced by canary yellow pills, like beads in a maraca, rattling in plastic. You sit on metal bleachers and cheer for a victory etched in a plastic oval, LED numbers.
It’s another slap of fluids, another hair tie taming curls of wheat-gold locks under a plastic cap. She’ll dive in and forget she’s warm-blooded, that she needs oxygen. Her gasps will define the turn of your chapped lips. You see her like a deer sees headlights, blinded. You identify every crevice you’d like to explore, lens-focus magnification of California poppies blurring through the car window.
“Let’s see LA,” you implore, and that’s nothing but a whim where you live. Los Angeles is not an American Dream for you. It’s an hour away on a good day, but let’s be real, you don’t have any of those anymore. The anxiety traffic makes it two hours. Three hours. And, what of curfew? What of the inhalation of tear gas, squirt bottles fervently drowning acid weaponry out of your eyes?
This is a time long forgotten by the peephole ceiling architecture. Acetone, colored plaster, stained glass galore. She’s just as wonderstruck by pure aesthetics of history as you, because nothing has been tainted by dirty, bourgeoisie fingernails. That you know of. You’re praying for an eternal disparity between mortals and art. You’d like to live in abstractions, free from denouncement. She talks of gift shop curios and tracing paper. She does not know what you know. She never will. Hopefully. She is entangled in a love affair between Self and Observer, but you’re the lucky one who will never have your life on a stage, who will always be nestled in the velvet audience.
She replies with a crinkle of the nose, “What’s in LA?” A cocky challenge. And you lose right away—disillusionment is the greatest thief. You’ve lost all but her. There is no escape but in blue plaid flannels and curly clouds and wet sand and a flash of teeth between pink, beckoning lips.
You sit on a black chair designed for proper posture, across from a music stand hiding her face, a dull horn indenting a crescent into her thigh, sheet music that begged to be audified. There are fracks, cracks, sputtering clacks of keys looking for the right twist of chambers to sing the note she desires. You don’t mind the droplets running down your neck. There’s no vents in the practice rooms. She’s stealing the oxygen, again, to vibrate through her horn, to climb up a chromatic scale. Condensation is a waterfall down the brass valves she empties.
One day, you’re swimming, too. Your first priority is touching the bottom, but you’re too buoyant to plunge eight feet under. She tells you the trick is in the shift of your weight. She often tells you all the answers, flips the math textbook to the solutions manual, places her cards face-up. It doesn’t mean your questions are answered, though. She has another victory, a wobbling figure diving to the white concrete to show you it’s not that hard.
You’re not a good swimmer. Especially not compared to her. Chlorine is too easy to swallow.