MaryAnn

The way that the waters fell made her entire world stop, as if something dangerous and clumsy could do a complete “360” around the idea of being fine. Blue memories flooding in that formation that brought back clear smiles from years ago and purple bruises singing “It’s a lie; he will do it again.” And due to jobs she let herself go with the red of pressure instead of the green that she had always deserved, all because of that one selfish person who decided that, her life, meant that she was no human at all.



MaryAnn was a casualty in my lifestyle, naturally there, but not too much of a bother. She wasn’t ever really in reality, so much her made up world of happiness which, somehow, made it impossible for her to even fake a half assed frown. Balancing her was not so easy, (even though you’d imagine that would never be an issue) and although her cheerful self made everyone’s life painfully simple, it is, and I quote, “not so great to talk about problems with me, because I just can’t relate.” She was witty and fast talking- the kind that made big time debaters question what they’ve been doing the past twenty years. I’m telling you: this girl could run against the head president of all time and win due to her perfectionist attitude when it comes to speeches. Writing wasn’t really interesting to her, though, just prefered to ramble until her words couldn’t catch up. One time I got horrible news, and she looked at me extremely confused, and she didn’t really do anything more than that. MaryAnn was a great friend; always having fun and dancing away my problems because she had none of her own, (well, she did, but had mastered the task of not acknowledging them) but after a while I guess she learned life beyond dreams, and found the reality which she had been hiding.

She had always been that shy person who sat in the back rows, not that she did not want to learn, but be called on, yet all in a year had she changed completely. It wasn't that she was a bookworm outside of class, but she did had her comfort zones. When she was around the age of nineteen going on twenty, I noticed her falling for a guy that slept with other girls. She showed up around me with bruises often, but then again, I thought, she’s always been anemic. MaryAnn talked less after dating this guy for a few months as if he had sewn her mouth shut. She was one that got stuck in love, and that is how most abusers work, but that I did not learn till years past. In the baby seat, she sat as a baby, when the car stopped and her mother got out to smoke. She then got back in the automobile drinking spiced rum, until arriving to her friends house. MaryAnn was left in the car for 48 hours until a stranger noticed, and called the police. She was taken from her birth family and put into foster care; this is how we met. Many years after this, she had bruises the same way I did before being taken away; she was skinny, too.

As children, we used to put the puzzle pieces together, while singing to Bon Iver as if he and Birdy could save us of all despair. The children- our foster siblings- were not as adventurous as we’d like, nor did they enjoy our company. We were not the kids who felt that we owed our life to someone who fed ten kids for government money- but that was only MaryAnn who put this into my mind. The more I thought about it; she was right, and she was about most things. I don’t know exactly how she had never drawn sad faces or carve them in skin or bark as the other kids did, but she was definitely the best kind of family to have. We had danced to Kimya Dawson in The Moldy Peaches, or Antsy Pants while eating pizza in the back of Karma’s back yard because she, our foster mother, told us we shall always eat outside. Back then she had always thrown us with the dead sunflowers by the huge trash cans behind her stupid blue painted, rotting wood apartments that were made out of old houses downtown. When we were about fourteen, we sat away from the other kids eating in the weeds, when MaryAnn started laughing so hard she cried because I whispered “Karma really is a bitch, huh?”

The only thing that made MaryAnn more mad than her own conspiracy theories was when people who had “gross finger-tips with big confidence” gathered the nerve to lay a line of their thumb print on her. Spending all day with them, she flipped out when our younger sisters who had just ate disturbingly sticky sweets reached out to her. Freaking like a fish out of water she began to run away… they chased. She would try to dodge their sugary little hands, but somehow, as if they were playing a football game, always failed. She was mostly disgusted by, well, everything. She used hand cleanser about 50 times before and after a meal, I mean she literally spent all her money on that stuff. Terrified of people’s inability to keep their hands to themselves, and their horrid arrogance, she typically tried to avoid people at all costs. It was never questionable if she was nice, but neither was it that she lived off of personal space and cleaning. She used wet rags for her daily scrubbing of our room, infact, that was the absolute best agreement we ever made: she was allowed to clean as much as she wanted and I was not to interfere. MaryAnn had made somewhat a hobby out of hating people who drained her; I’m convinced that she was allergic to narcissism, although she soon fell in love with it.

Surprisingly, I don’t remember much from our teenage years except the way that she rolled out of bed some days instead of taking her time to get up correctly, claiming it was “more fun.” Sometimes I’d wake up at various hours of late-night-early-mornings and she’d be gone. I’d never really worried for her those times, because I always knew she was out singing all her lungs could take. Other times she’d be up at six sharp reciting Maya Angelou while stirring the insides of cracked eggs with milk. She had always been her annoyingly constant happy self until she turned eighteen. This was the year that we both got kicked out of foster care and would have to figure out what our lives would be. MaryAnn decided that she wanted to get a green apartment and someday fall in love, but instead she worked in that ugly red office building and the love of her life was so mad he hit her. I had never known way until after the fact, but her favorite color was clear. She favored this weird waterfall that was oddly built around by her house, and sometimes she’d sit there and tell me how much she hated blue. MaryAnn had told me a few days before, knowing that I’d been waiting one day to write of her, that she had always been a “past tense kind of girl,” and I knew.

My sanity came in the form of a dirty minded, witty talking, twenty three year old, five foot four girl, who laughed at the humor that no one would. My sanity came with the green eyed foster sister of mine who continued to sing, or rather, yell the lyrics of First Day of My Life even after she was crying from both the laughter and melancholy melody. A girl who said screw wishing upon shooting stars, because only the universe would understand our needs, was the only thing I ever had, needed, and wanted. The sister who would sneak out to anywhere that the guys would stare but never dare to touch, because she had always twirled her hips and said “someone will appreciate me for what I’ve got,” although she was terribly wrong. She never wanted someone to complete her, she said, because she felt that love was not relying on each other for happiness. If MaryAnn wasn’t the only thing that perfection looked up to, then perfection itself did not exist. Her sanity was the colors she’d yet to explore, because she always had comfort zones. Her sanity came in the way that blood did, in the flow of water…


The way the water fell resembled the way that MaryAnn did that day. She was blue and purple, but wished to be one with clear. Was too hard of a worker, lover, and good person, caught up before reality. Red overpowered her completely before she would ever reach far enough out that the print of her finger could touch green. MaryAnn was a girl that could have had the entire world, all as if she would not have to sit before a mirror crying at her boney self and whisper: “It’s a lie; he will do it again.”