Goldie Peacock 🔈

When they were born, my partners had pale skin, red lips and black hair, so strangers called them Snow White. Like Snow White, animals would flock to them. They were the ones friends went to for advice on how to start or end a relationship, though they weren’t so good at the ending part themselves. They had blood red bedsheets, dark wood rocking chairs, stethoscopes that at some point they handed to me and said Have you ever listened to your own heartbeat? They were Earth signs and Water signs and Air signs, believers in astrology but also free will, a muddy, bubbly mess, speedy neat freaks faster than me (except for The One, calm beacon), strong swimmers, lovers of herbs they lit and beckoned into their lungs, some secretly and others not. They drove me around, drove me mad, drove me to drill down into what it was about me, us, them, that brought us here. They had short hair and long hair, shaved and shagged and fauxhawked and free. They wore eco-friendly sneakers and boat shoes and army boots and Chelsea boots and $300 wingtip Oxfords. We shared clothes. We wrote sticky notes of love. I think of them when I open my jewelry box. We will not know the full story until one of us dies. We are all the heroes of our journeys. They would claim they are not, they are of service, more selfless than that, except for The One. I don’t even want to say it, but being the hero of my journey, I picture myself as the last one standing, on a rock in a stormy sea, feeling the tugs of their tethered depths, so what I’ll say instead is with The One in the audience, I’ll read this somewhere in 50 years, saying how gravity shifts when speculation comes true and I didn’t know how true it would be when I wrote it, though no one can know this until they’ve experienced it themself. I never had a type, I’ll continue, Although I guess you could say now I do, as I gesture to The One, age 100, Who’s put up with me for over half our lives, and everyone will applaud.