My Senior Footprint by ANELI AGUILLON

"Ominous" by Aneli Aguillon

_{Churning seas.}

_{The color blue. Blue knitted together by a cobalt sweater, rough with the scent of burning Christmas wood smoke. Blue with the hollow gaps between the white fuzzy floating cotton balls hanging amidst the universe – the sky. Blue with Earth.}

_{Creating, swirling, and churning.}

_Molding.

_{Fire. Red. Molten and dripping and chunks of clay being scolded into a riotous mass of sparks and red and yellow and orange. The angry hiss of lava.}

_Yellow.

_{Yellow is a sad, sad color you know.
Forget the purples, the blues, the maroons, and magentas.}

_Yellow.

_{The sickly, pale way it sticks on the hollow crevasses in a wan face. The way it seeps in the skin, permeates a deep sense of forbidding. Illness. Nausea. Sweat. Sticky palms, and itchy fingers.}

_{The yellow tardy notes, the yellow ring of hazy eyes, the yellow vomit, and the yellow unceasing list of words highlighting what’s wrong – with you.}

_{Labels of prescriptions, spoiled milk, and sweat spilling into squinted eyes.}

_{This is nausea.}

_{This is anxiety.}

_{This is yellow.}

_{Cascading petals.}

_{You know, the rays of light that are spilling – practically bursting – from the sun and tickling my closed eyelids? They dance and they flutter atop my lids painting images of fleeting shadows. Warm. Toasty. Like a sip of your mother’s hot and rich laded chicken soup – spent after a day of stirring from a wooden spoon. Smooth.}

_{Booming thunderstorms.}

_{The kind that shakes your toes, your nose twitches, and you snuggle under a bundle of cool sheets as you whisper tales amid a hot cup of cocoa and the blue skies. Cool in rays of blue – the soft sweet patter of the skies tears. Sitting underneath the garage awning looking at the raindrops spilling haphazard and flying in all directions in mad glee. You wonder if raindrops aren’t Heaven’s tears after all but the cathartic relief of laughing. You know, those laughs and fits you get when you’re so down a single word just topples you right over your steel grey cloud and you’re falling. Falling with laughter, toppling over your bum and landing on a smile. The fits of giggles reaching the pitch of your 3}_^rd_{grade kid’s shrill of glee as he zooms down the slide yelling, “Again! Again!” Or the deep, booming clap of engines whistling and thundering along train tracks as the laugh falls like the thud of bricks and mortar. Sturdy, solid. Or the laugh shared between cackles, giggles, and shrills. The kind between friends, lovers, family and the solitude and contentment as you chuckle at yourself from shaking the bottle of ketchup too hard and yet somehow nothing is coming out and you’re wondering why, so you turn it and open it and BAM! a surprise bloodbath greets you in the eyes similar to staring directly into the Sun as it screams, “HELLO!”.
You know, those kinds of tears.}

_{The point I’m trying to make – or at least in trying to ramble and hope along the way it sounds like sense – that things are complex. Things are different. Things are about as stagnant as Texas weather.
We have sunny days, blue days, maroon days, and the days that aren’t quite so hazy or aren’t quite so sharp with the bitter bite of acrid yellow-green. Some days are orange and violent pink.}

_{And some days are in between – when the colors are thrown about and spilt and splattered all over the place making shades of tints, hues and colors you never knew existed. Or felt.}

_{Life is weird. Life is messy.}

_{But regardless, it keeps on giving. Whether that be a flat tire, dented fender, and a crying kid in the car accusing the other kid on the charge of 3}_^rd_{degree assault of arm pinching – or the brilliance of the sun itself captured within that very smile as the person of your dreams comes waltzing into your heart and down the aisle toward you.}

_{It gives. It gives, and it gives, and it gives.}

_{Crappy, bad, good, amazing – lint in the corner of your sweater and something not-quite-sticky; life gives.}

_{And I hope you all seize it – the ominous and foreboding tones, the whole crazy shebang – and you look it in the eye and say, “Hey. You, yeah you with the extra panini press, battle scars from the toaster as you risk and swear the bread can be pressed even more solidly in, and tax-paying citizen you.”}

_{You made it into the future – the present. And you’re breathing, blinking, and hey even exhaling. It’s a good day. You survived.}

_{Wasn’t quite so ominous after all was it now?}

_{The big old “f” word (keep it PG guys, c’mon)}_foreboding_{is but an illusion and a good last resort of the humans instinct of survival. And let me tell you, though it sucks in the beginning nothing sucks quite as fiercely as the hot pinching regret on your flushed skin.}

_{So be ominous, be foreboding – and show them what you got. Because it sure isn’t all you’ve got to shine in this rainy, cloudy world.}

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