To See, To Be

 Gloria walked into the flowerbed. She didn’t know why they called it a “bed.” Well, she assumed that the “flowers” were supposed to be there but not the other part, the ugly part. The top layer of wood chips manifested as being anything but comfortable or dream-giving. When she walked barefoot on them, she wondered if she were actually a princess or a goddess in a past life. Pain came easily there as pain comes in life when you leave your shoes in the house.

No, I do not want to sleep there, she told herself, strolling along.

I am “restless,” not another word. She sighed. Words followed her wherever she went. If she saw the letters combine and a sound is uttered, inciting them, even though her rosy lips, the words stayed with her for eternity.

Her thoughts dipped down so deeply into her brain.

She paused and then felt an impulse to move. It stung her body.

“Restive” popped out. Many times words assaulted their ordinary parts, twisting meanings around, rudely rhyming. Though in the country where she lived, children were only taught through the third grade, and usually only to read, write, and put numbers together on bills, she mused you learn just by living.

And she couldn’t stop the words from entering her head.

“Restive,” she said out loud. It is the same word as “restless.”

"Or to live at rest."

People complicate the world so much, she figured. Why is the world thicker than a bush with chitchat and gossip?

“Hate” means “hate” and “love” means “love.” The people in the bushes, they made “hate-love” and “love-hate” to sound clever. No one saw these hidden people because so many people couldn’t translate them in a relevant fashion.

Our lifeboats.

You love hate. “Love-hate.” You hate love. “Hate-love.” These were the same expressions.

Hate wins either way in this “vocabulary,” even in the greenest of places of sweet dews ‘morning kisses, sparkling as do diamonds under the waking sun, so golden.

“That’s why it’s better to say to state a situation plainly. You hate,” Gloria mused and kicked a stone.

What do I hate? She asked herself.

Pain.

The cat who ate her cute kittens. The dad who left. The mom who beat her.

“But pain can be washed away,” her grandma once told her. “Love cannot.”

This bothered Gloria in her thoughts, much further along than her classmates.

Hate is pain. Can’t love be washed away, too? She asked herself.

Gloria saw her grandma’s eyes in the bird-feeder, though she had died three days before. No matter how many times she swished her reflection, the water settled and she saw her eyes, the same as her grandma’s.

In that moment came true understanding. She knew her grandma had given her sight.

To love.

It was up to her to use that vision.