Dandelion Bones

Dandelion Bones (A Zuihitsu)

Deborah Brown

Things that lose by being photographed:

Sunsets. Stars. Storm clouds. The sky in any form. Moments with friends when my ribs hurt from laugher. The cool night air on walks through neon-lit streets. Intricate shadows that branches cast on the sidewalk. Tall buildings. Christmas trees. Trafc lights refecting on wet pavement. Raindrops.

Depressing things:

Dents in new cars. New Year’s Eve in Alaska. Fireweed season, and the way the colorful world shifts so quickly as frost, snowdrifts, and shadows paint everything in black and white. The frst time I skip the song I’ve been listening to on repeat, or when my favorite songs just sound like noise. Entire pages of writing, deleted by the computer. Somehow my writing always feels worse when I try to recreate it from memory.

Sleeping too late on a sunny day. The guilty feeling when you don’t like a gift someone gives you. Sunday afternoons: something about them just feels like a cemetery. Those days when I fnd all my friends too busy to talk.

Empty mailboxes. Rotting fruit. Bad pieces by favorite artists. Chipped mugs.

Arriving at the airport with no one to meet me.

Places I feel small:

In cemeteries, I am aware of my smallness in time. Beneath millions of stars, I am aware of my smallness in space.

Airports. Interstates. Other people’s hometowns. In the arms of giant trees. By the ocean. Lying on a bed of grass or tiny wildfowers.

Hospitals.

Thoughts on dandelions:

I want to lie in a feld of dandelions, so that when the wind blows, it will scatter my bones like wishes and seeds.

I wish I had the confdence to worm my roots through the dirt, to claim something as my home, whether or not others believed I belonged there.

Christopher Tran