Scrapbook Words
Passing Glance
By Airea Johnson
By Kayla Wittyngham
I sit here and wonder, I think, I ponder on what to write. What I can share with you, give you this piece of me that you’ll someday forget. My words a silhouette that will one day evaporate…like me.
I pass him in the hallway every couple days and try to catch his eyes so that I can remember exactly what shade of blue they are.
I hesitate…what if I get it wrong, what if you never understand? What if I confuse you with these emotions that even I can’t even comprehend. I want to write about my feminism and how fragile men compare me to a Nazi, write about having nothing to my name but a stereotype; my “beat the odds poor-kid success story.” I hold my tongue. Somehow I have forgotten how to speak after her narcissism cut me off for so long. I left Alabama more than 2 years ago and I still talk about the abuse in present tense, sometimes when I see violence on TV I hold my breath or hear shouting I flinch…she doesn’t get to choose when to be a parent after she spent so long burrowing in her rabbit hole of complacency and denial…how can I describe the rabbit hole without inviting you down with me? How will I successfully express the tender way I carry the love for myself, so deeply like the stitches of a throw-blanket while simultaneously wearing my depression like Ray Bans on my face, looking through shades of grey.. a walking contradiction. I could talk about the way I thought a toxic relationship was my Disney Princess story; romanticized emotional abuse with a side of “victimized damsel.” How was I not supposed to fall in love with his bird cage hands, when all I ever wanted to do was fly? He warmed his ice cube lies around my furnace heart that I so willingly let him in, the weight of manipulation that was tied around my hollow bones left me crawling back to him every time, I had never related to Atlas more in my life, but the world that I had carried on my shoulders was his. Someone once asked me why I’m so worried about sharing my words with others and I responded, “No one wants to read art if it’s not pretty.” 10
I could go cliché but it’s not my fault that I remember them as Sunday morning skies, streaked with streams of airplane trails, the ocean in July, crisp, crashing, and darker the deeper you go, two sapphires glimmering in a glass case, polished and shiny. Today, they were more like the Internet Explorer logo at the bottom of my desktop. a Frost Glacier Freeze Gatorade after cardio. a crinkled wrapper on one of the Zephyrhills water bottles I’ve collected on my dresser. Some days his eyes are Superman’s tights. a Ravenclaw Quidditch uniform, Eleven’s windbreaker in Stranger Things. No matter how hard I try, how long I sit and think, how many familiar things I try to compare them to, I cannot remember what his eyes look like. In quiet moments, I remember when we used to talk. I recall the calmness in his eyes. They were always so cool and measured. I remember when we would glance at each other for fleeting moments in between conversations, spending every second we could stand memorizing each others’ features. And I try to remember the exact color of his eyes 11
