for Jen Meyer It was innocent to start, how Jenny and I gathered the dried bits of cacti that had fallen on the trail in the desert dome in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Inside the dome, it was hot; outside, snow, and at eight years old, we had never before seen anything so prickly, raised as we were amongst trillium and violets. Perhaps the docents had told us not to touch. Surely we knew better than to take something we found, but we gathered the strange and spiky rounds like the treasure they were and carried them in our knit hats. Years later, I can’t recall how we were caught. But I remember the sting of thousands of hair-thin spines in my scalp, my skin. That was how I learned something unusual and beautiful could also be cruel, that some things will hurt you simply because that is how they are made. But oh, how I love that girl, the one who wanted so badly to touch and be touched by the world. Keep touching, I want to tell her. Even when it hurts. There is so much you will never know any other way. |