Me

When Marley was four, her mother crouched in the corner of a turquoise bedroom.  The four year-old's knee was locked straight and embellished by a band-aid that curled upwards at one edge.  There was an intolerable searing sensation beneath the band-aid.  Marley's mother removed the hands that had been picking at the knee, glanced into her daughter's blue eyes, and looked closer at the place of pain. Calm words soothed the stinging wound first; then long fingers, stiff from typing, stretched to the curled edge of the band-aid. They ripped it off. The stinging on her knee was stronger than it had been before.  Then fully gone. The small red speck left below, a reminder of a young attempt at no training wheels, was covered with kisses and a cookie.

When Marley was eleven, she was taught to flip open a banana.  She learned to hold the yellow arch concave to her slim wrist, press her fingertips firmly against the stem, and flick; the banana would slit open, tumble downwards, and then dangle from a wax-like strip of yellow skin.  The freshly exposed interior of the banana always contrasted starkly against the fruit's dandelion coat and dark freckles; it was afraid to be uncovered but could not belong in its skin. Marley's knobby fingers gingerly slid out the edible interior.  The slashed peel was tossed in the can below the kitchen sink: yellow and brown added to the heap while the white rested on a napkin. 

When Marley was sixteen, she decided to layer shadows. Labeling her goal as a pursuit to “notice things”, Marley embarked on a quest to develop a deeper and truer sense of reality.  She began by purchasing a brown journal from an old, wooden shop in Spain; in it compiling the motivations, ideas, and tales of those who hiked along El Camino. For months since, she has collected long, gangly, and stocky shades of gray, then meticulously stored them away in a towering pile of increasing opacity. Many connote an atmosphere of collected shadows with an image of eerie darkness; however, Marley believes that layering produces the brightest interior: the freshest sting and most edible white.