3 p.m. on the Lakefront Path
3 p.m. on the lakefront path is a man shaking a flyer at me like a fist: “REPENT: GOD IS JUSTICE.” A few moments before we almost collide, it smells like sunscreen and garbage. Middle of July but I’ve got goosebumps, nineteen-mile-per-hour winds loosening golden seed pods from the trees so that it looks and feels like fall. I’m halfway through a three-mile run with an old summer playlist on shuffle—been skipping songs in hopes I will land on the one I want by accident; can’t remember the title or the artist but know I’m right about one line: “The human mind gets way fucking sick of beauty.” The man with the flyer lumbers toward me while a little boy grips the straps of his backpack and chases a crow the way my girlfriend’s husky would: like he wants to tear it limb from limb. Broke up with her again last week because some feelings are too good to be trusted and woke up the next day to find the mural wall’d been painted over. I blinked and assumed it was an optical illusion, the morning sun reflecting off the paint until it shined, but the closer I got the whiter it turned, an abrupt lack of colors where it’d been so recently all of them. Impossible to resist reading these happenings as omens: the baby bird splashed onto the pavement in the alley, the whitewashing of the mural wall, the way the wind was rattling and twisting the trees that day, as if they were its toys. I stood there briefly single, feeling like a freshly picked scab, watching the lake hurl itself against the break wall like it was pissed it couldn’t bleed. I was trying to think of something to compare it to—something that alive and furious and suffering—but the only word I could come up with, out of all the words there are to choose from, was “thrashing.” I, too, have wanted to feel something thrash between my teeth. What else could explain my instinct this afternoon to stomp on a monarch, wings spread out there prostrate on the pavement? How powerful the urge to crush something vulnerable, to wrap a name around its naked throat. To believe we understand what makes things flee and what makes them open. When my girlfriend sliced into the bell pepper last night, there was another, smaller bell pepper inside of it. A world within a world, bold and bright and bulging. “Look,” she commanded, beaming, and I looked. A seed pod drops onto my wrist and my wrist jerks away, yanking one earbud out of my ear. I replace it and skip another song, then another. The little boy catches me watching him and glares at me as if to say, “When you write about this later, don’t you dare call me little.” Right before the man with the flyer drags his eyes from my shaved head to my rainbow socks and thrusts his words at me, the monarch startles me by fluttering away. I’d thought it was already dead, but it turns out I was wrong. Sometimes it feels better than being right. Rounder, more whole. So I look up from the ground, newly wrong. And open.
About the Author
Jax Connelly (they/she) is an award-winning writer whose creative nonfiction explores the intersections of queer identity, unstable bodies, and mental illness. Their essays have received honors including four Notables in the Best American Essays series, Nowhere's Fall 2020 Travel Writing Prize, and first place in the 2019 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, among others. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, [PANK], The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, Pleiades, No Tokens, and more.
Illustration by Jane Demarest.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
