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Green

You sweet Lemon Boy, you look so good in green. ?“?Lemon Boy and me started to get along together I’d help him plant his seeds and we mowed the lawn in bad weather.?” ?You’ve got a devilish aura that resonates in my mind like a string quartet. Sometimes my soul complains to me when you’re not around.

I hope you love yourself, there is so much to admire in your swift, numbing silence. I adore your charming little oddities and slight strangeness in your cocoa eyes. Your melancholy manner will be the death of me, my dearest! Will you stay strong for me like he said he would for her? Please?

You slouched into the worn burgundy recliner, so unsuspecting of the world around you. The classroom echoed in its emptiness as the day melted into a pinky glow. You said to me “This is my favorite song”, and since I’ve listened to it every day. “?I hope you feel happy That’s all I want?.” I admire your great patience with that boy in the yellow dress with fuschia flowers. Even when you played the piano so delicately, he refused to pull the plug on his red guitar amp. I think the speakers almost blew out, but I don’t know. Do you?

I want to play the violin. It would be so beautiful, wouldn’t it? They say brown eyes are nothing special until you love someone that has them. I wish you could see it too. I wish you could see that small grin you try to hide when you strum minor chords on ukuleles. Or, the way you softly strum the electric guitar that was dipped into orange paint. “?And I can never find the time To bury my hands in words I’d grow a new kind of evergreen tree, just for you and me?.”

You are oh so quiet my dear, but not to a fault. I know you’re hurting and your heart aches for a desire to keep on living. May I beg you to stay? “?And I know it makes you nervous But I promise you, it’s worth it To show ’em everything you kept inside?.” You’re a surreal burst of subtleness, a true human. There is great beauty in being so.

I thank you for sitting with me under that ragged brown blanket with me on the schooltop. Charged air caressed our rosy cheeks and soft hymns made me believe in you. “?They’re gonna watch me Disappear into the sun.”? ?I looked down just a ways onto the struggling swimmers and told you of those long days I spent underwater dreaming of the clouds, but never seeing them. I want to hold you and feel your dingy jacket that you hide your soul in.

We ventured into the Valley of the Wind and you nestled into my shoulder and fell asleep on me for what seemed like an eternity. I love the way your honey hair hesitantly falls to shadow your face. Your tinges of electricity make my hands quiver and turn my dreams into fevers. When I see you, I see the static buzzing of LED lights and anxious souls. Thank you for wrapping you arm around me and tucking me into a blanket. The fabric was horrendously dirty, but I didn’t even care because I was there with you.

You are a lovely, lonely thing to ponder over. But I would not have it any other way. We walked down the ill streets lit by street lamps and fairies that glowed in the trees. You strummed tangy chords that filled my mouth with citrus and sorrow. ?Just k? eep walking.

Do you miss the pools of turquoise that accumulated on our eyelashes like I do? I hold it close to me. We sat in your room with a fluorescent glob of blue luminescence that reeks of nylon. “Hand of God” by Jon Bellion rippled through dense air and reached my lungs only if I inhaled with sweet intentions. “?When you’re lost in the universe, lost in the universe?.” ?The curious insistence of my eyes to be drawn to yours refuses to cease.

I’ll carry these stories home in hazy light and write you a song. You’re a silly Lemon Boy who speaks of hold habit and stole my pink, throbbing heart. “?I hope you love yourself Your body and heart?.” ?You looked so good in green that night.

***

Who am I, to romanticize such encounters? Yet, it would be out of my nature to not

express my mind’s wanderings, revert to my old habits for a day, or ponder over its secret meaning. How I adored when we swayed in the dim living room with the faint hum of music in the background. For how long we stood, I am unsure. My dearest, hold me like you did, close to your chest and staring incessantly into your lovely eyes. I do not recall the words said or any small notions made by the latter of us, but I do remember how your arms draped over my tense shoulders.

They were correct. My forbidden strings of words are liabilities and I am simply a little too much. “?I do my best to meet her demands Play at romance, we slow dance In the living room, but all that a stranger would see Is one girl swaying alone Stroking her cheek?.” Oh the sickening irony.

I had finally exited the everlasting spiral of my own thoughts, to be scooped up moments later by a different storm.

Elizabeth Duvall is a seventeen-year-old writer and poet from Northern California. “Green” is her first publication.