Defective

Riordan Bo was ten years old when he finally began to grasp the concept of his Companion Band. Those words had been said a million times since his birth in Colorado Springs and he had only just begun hating them. It felt less like a band and more like a clock embedded in the inside of his wrist, meant to display a countdown in flickering black numbers, accurate down to the second. One of his friends bragged to him at the top of the slide yesterday about how he only had two more years left, and proceeded to whip out his wrist for all to behold. Other boys in their awed semi-circle cried out in words mixed of jealousy and congratulations.

Riordan turned from the group and pulled up his sleeve to stare down at his own numbers, his face darkening. The grim, ever-present digits gawked back at him, five pairs of dead eyes.

00:00:00:00:00

“Marietta Sykes, you’re next, dear,” the school counselor called into the waiting room. Marietta skittered after her through the office door and perched in a plaid chair opposite another, which the counselor came to occupy. A sigh pushed through the woman’s nostrils as she regarded Marietta.

“Mrs. Meyhue tells me you’re being teased again.”

Marietta lowered her head, blinking at her knobby knees.

“Are those girls still saying mean things to you? About your Companion Band?”

Marietta nodded in small rapid jerks, this Michigan mitten keychain she’d clipped to her shoelaces jostling with the motion. Her eyes remained on her knees.

“I didn’t want to have to say this, but you might need to consider wearing gloves, or even a watch – something to cover it up. I wish I could tell you different, Marietta, but you’ll be graduating from elementary school and going to middle school after the summer. If you don’t do something to prevent the teasing, it will only get worse.”

Marietta brought her wrist up to her eyes, skimming her thumb over the digits. They held no pulse.

00:00:00:00:00

Riordan gazed at his reflection in the remnants of breakfast. The bowl quivered in the hum of the dishwasher against the countertop, and his face was distorted in the rippling milk.

“Mom?” he asked, dumping his dish in the sink. “What happened when your numbers ran out?”

“Hmm?” she replied, her gaze flickering over to him for a second. One hand held a mug of steaming tea and the other cradled her newest obsession – an iPad. “Oh, on my Companion Band? You really must call it what it is, darling, or else you’ll get people confused.” She took a liberal sip of the herbal mixture and sighed dreamily. “They stopped when I first met your father, of course. Don’t they teach you about your Bands in school? They must have by now – you're already thirteen, for goodness sake!”

“Yeah, Mom, they have,” he said. “Did you…did you like any other guys before you met dad? Did you date anyone else?”

A horrified expression overcame her delicate features. “Gracious, no! Riordan, where on earth are you getting these ideas? Companion Bands only come in pairs. I didn’t know what your father looked like or who he was, but I knew when I would meet him. No one dates anymore, Riordan, you know that. We just wait for our Companions, and that’s it.”

“Okay,” he said, but his mind drifted elsewhere. Scratching his wrist, he wandered back to his room to don his soccer gear.

00:00:00:00:00

Marietta sat in the dust that called home to the vacant side stairwell of Vicksburg High School, sniffling and shredding her nose with the rough fabric of her favorite Charlotte Russe hoodie. A garment she never left home without, the thick black sleeves hung past her fingers, shielding her Companion Band from searching eyes. Even the heat wave telling of summer’s arrival hadn’t deterred her from donning it that morning. The cuff, flawless in its sole duty, did not prevent the murmurs and stares, and tokens from elementary school pierced the fabric as if it had never existed.

The door shimmied open and Marietta startled, only settling down when she realized it was her friend Jimmie.

“Oh, Mar, what’s happened this time?” she cooed, taking a seat next to the girl and wrapping her arms around her shoulders. Marietta leaned into the familiar presence and worried the sleeve’s worn hem.

“I was in that stupid career planning workshop with Mr. Whitt. He asked us to write down our goals in life and told us to start thinking about how we might get there and achieve them, or whatever. So I wrote mine down and Darcy, the fathead, was sitting next to me, and she snorted in my ear! She stole my paper and told me to keep dreaming! Then she called me defective and I didn’t want to hear any more of it, so I left.”

“What did you write?”

Mar wrung her wrist and sucked back more tears ready to fall.

“To love,” she whispered, voice trembling, “and be loved in return.”

00:00:00:00:00

There's a Crack in My Crystal Ball

The entirety of last week, I was deeply unhappy; my soul possessed a supreme discontentment – even the bits of soul down in my pinky toes felt it! And the worst part? I couldn’t even put to words why. Thoughts could not embody this disturbance in my being. It drove me crazy.

For days, I woke up with a frown that barely shifted with each passing hour. A reason to pin this crappiness on would have been marvelous, but it took a while for me to properly interpret it.

As most of you know, I am in college finishing up my junior year with a double major in Psychology and Creative Writing. The double major had been something I was 100% certain of even before I set foot on campus in the fall of 2012, as well as plans to go on and get a Master’s in Psych. Freshly 18 years old, I had the next 6 to 8 years of my life planned out as far as academics, and at least 4 years of that I was undoubtedly sure of.

Now that I am on the cusp of finishing my 3^rd year out of 4 in undergraduate studies, the post-graduation future is looming and the pressure of that unfortunately has pushed me to be the most stressed out I have ever been in my life, and I do not say that lightly. I do not get stressed because I don’t allow myself to, but over that week I had to admit that I was discontent with something and stressed out about it. But what the heck was it? I needed more variables to fill in this equation – thus far it was all question marks.

I had been doing what every decent Christian does – pray. Most of my prayers that week consisted of me asking for clarity about my future, about where I was supposed to go and what to do. A couple weeks before that ultimate-stress-week, I had been telling God to make it obvious when He lets me in on my future plans, because I know I’m not the best at interpreting between my feelings and God’s intentions. I distinctly recall saying during family prayer time for God to sledgehammer the obviousness into my head if need be.

Careful what you pray for, kids.

Stress-week was emotionally and spiritually painful (sledgehammer to the soul?). Wednesday night I finally found a faint glimmer of clarity: I didn’t want to go to grad school in Psychology anymore.

It was a feeling before it was a verbalized concept, one that presented itself in tears before words.

There was an acute internal trigger, and through the sniffles I verbalized to myself why I was so discontent. I had realized I didn’t want to go to grad school in Psychology and I had to tell myself it was okay. It’s okay when plans change – now is much better than later, too; for instance, in the middle of a Master’s program for Psych I sure as heck would not have wanted this realization. And anyway, it didn’t currently change much, although initially I thought it changed everything (more stress).

I wanted to write. As soon as I admitted that to myself, I was rushed with alleviation. I wanted to get an MFA, go to a graduate school program that would better my skills. Writing is my passion and has been solidly since 2010, but the seed was planted years before that. Writing is something I cannot live without, while psychology can remain dormant without much fuss – there are so many indicators of this that I feel a fool for not seeing them. Last semester I didn’t have any creative writing classes whatsoever and didn’t have any time to write creatively, so academic papers took over. By the end of the semester, I was crazy with the need to write something, anything creative.

Over spring break (February 28^th to March 8^th) I was home with my parents, and the very first day I was there, my dad and I had a lengthy conversation about the future. At that point I had still been sure about my Master’s-in-Psych decision, and I told this to him. He squinted his eyes a little and gave a small smile, saying he thought years ago that my idea was that creative writing is the capstone and psychology was going to be a helper in that realm. Writing was the Pacific Ocean and psychology was just one of the many rivers that eventually leads into it. Instead, psychology had taken over, in retrospect I think because I had career-minded thinking and had already written off using a creative writing major as a potential future career.

Funny how people on the outside have more insight into my own mind.

Later in the realization week I got Chinese take out for dinner. I happened to walk out with two fortune cookies and for some reason only cracked open one. The fortunes was unsurprisingly inconsequential and irrelevant.

On Sunday I got the urge to crack open the other one, just because. I hadn’t even planned to eat it. The message inside made me roll my eyes and smile.

God finds himself hilarious.

And I blessedly find myself in the arms of pure contentment. 

Tour of Verona (Image Heavy!)

Ciao, everyone!

As most of you have seen or heard, I took a trip to Verona on Sunday, April 6^th and spent the entire day wandering the city and snapping pictures. (In fourteen hours I had taken three hundred and fifty-three pictures, which equates to about one picture every two and a half minutes.) Needless to say, I was wiped out when I got home and I’m still feeling the effects of the intense walking multiplied by the strong sun and long day. Is travel-hangover a thing?

Much to my glee, at about 7:30am I found out we were riding on double decker charter buses from Milan to Verona, so we were definitely rolling in style. I made sure to get a seat on the upper story, naturally. This greatly altered the usual perspective I would have had as we zoomed down the freeway.

During the two and a half hour trip (felt a lot longer somehow) I noted several things dealing with the landscape and its changes as we left Milan and neared Verona. There was a surprising amount of hollowed out buildings that really made me itch to explore them, one of them being what looked like an old school, perhaps middle or high by American standards. Accompanying that were several grand, refreshing stretches of green (Milan, as a city, lacks much greenery) with big factories dotting the fields, and this reminded me repeatedly of the long van rides I became accustomed to in Peru between home and the grocery store forty-five minutes away, except instead of greenery it was mountains of sand and billboards. One other random thing I realized was that people actually do ride their horses through the vineyards. I thought it was only a movie fictionalization that had caught on, but no, that’s just how they travel more efficiently from the front to the back of their vineyards (of which there were very, very many).

Upon arriving in Verona, the first stop was the massive Roman Arena from the 3rd century. It's been converted into a place that the Veronese hold concerts and operas in the summer when the nights are warm. The weird pink hue the whole arena has is due to the fact that it was built with white and pink limestone. 

 

 

The structure itself is beautiful, but the view out into the city from the topmost steps is noteworthy as well. 

After working out my knees on all the steps up and down the arena, we wandered the streets toward our next destination, which the city is very well known for: Juliet's house and balcony. The streets were narrow and cobblestoned, and did nothing to help the already forming ache in my feet, and tourists abounded. It was difficult to squeeze through some mobs of people even as a little individual like me and I saw numerous men and women powering strollers through the masses which must have been exceedingly frustrating. I could only attempt to strategically maneuver my way around people. Honestly I don’t think Juliet’s balcony was worth all the fuss of getting through the crowd (it was a very popular tourist attraction), but still, it was just one stop along the way.

To get to the famous balcony in the courtyard inside Juliet’s house, we had to walk through a long archway that had walls painted with white to resemble canvases. These were there for couples to write their names together on, I suppose to echo Romeo and Juliet's love (I'm not a huge fan of the play, but the idea is nice).

Another symbol that could be found around the city to signify the discovery of true love (again due to Romeo and Juliet) was to buy a padlock, lock it on a gate or chain, and throw the key away (generally into the river, just to add even more drama) to show that true love never dies, or something sappy like that. Made some neat pictures, at least. 

From there we broke for lunch, and the two girls I was with and I wandered away from the tourist food and found a nice place with outside seating. I had pizza of course, and the tomato sauce was so rich in taste I couldn’t help but eat the whole thing. I regret nothing.

Next on the agenda was climbing to the top of the Lambert Tower. It’s eighty-four meters high (two hundred and seventy-five feet) and was begun in 1172, but many restorations and enlargements happened in later years due to a lightning bolt strike as well as simple upkeep. The clock was added in 1779, so that was definitely not written in the original plan.

There are nearly four hundred steps to get to the bell hold, circling around and around, but thankfully there was an elevator. The view of the town from the top was breathtaking to say the least. 

 

Following this exciting excursion, we dragged ourselves to the Basilica Sant’Anastasia, which retains the same basic structure of many other basilicas and cathedrals I’ve visited. It was beautiful on the outside and incredible on the inside, everything so ornate and elegant, as the Italian churches are wont to be. The construction began in 1280 and finished in 1400 (and we think it takes modern construction workers forever to get anything done).

Once done there, we stumbled up several steep flights of stairs to the overview in front of Castel San Pietro which provided an impressive overlook of the city with the river flowing through it.

 

We were only able to rest for a few minutes before wandering back down the stairs to another cathedral called Duomo di Verona. A choral performance was going on when we got there and the singing was heavenly, made even better by the astounding acoustics of the Duomo so that anywhere you were in the cathedral, you could hear it. I think it’s nice that the Italians still utilize these churches not only as sorts of museums for us tourists to poke our noses in and sniff around but also as actual meeting places to worship and listen to sermons. They are fully functional, in that respect, but the wooden pews leave a lot to be desired.

Our last stop as the sun was descending and the minutes were ticking down to our departure was a castle called Castelvecchio, which means “castle old” when translated literally. It is the most important military construction of the Scaliger dynasty that ruled the city in the Middle Ages. Construction was carried out between 1354 and 1376, so says an online source. It was fairly large but compact and there was a lot to take in, though unfortunately we didn’t have the time for all of it. We kind of had to rush through the last half of it, and even lost our guide twice just trying to keep up.

We loaded back up into our buses and waved goodbye to Verona at around 6:30pm. My thighs screamed, my toenails hurt (is that even a thing?), and I was daydreaming about sleeping in my bed back in the apartment, but even with all these things floating around in my head, I still felt the day had been spent well. I was very satisfied with my time in Verona, who I spent it with, and the pictures I took. I can't imagine I’ll ever be back there, but it was definitely a good choice to go.

So thank you, Verona, for making my sixth of April memorable.

As for other general updates, this week I’ll be passing the halfway mark (I’ve been here nearly fifty days already!) and spring break is in a week and a half and stretches from the 17^th to the 27^th. I’m not quite sure what I’ll be doing over that time just yet, but there are some possible options on the horizon, so we’ll see. I’d rather not just be in Milan the entire time because I don’t have to worry about classes for such a long while I’d like to take advantage of that, but the main thing for me that’s hard is finding anyone to go places with me because most everyone I’ve spoken to has already been where I still want to go. I’ll figure it out.

In any case, I have a Venice trip this coming Saturday, which I am super pumped for, and I’m hoping to at least get Florence in before my time here is up. Rome would be fantastic, but I’m not sure how plausible it would be. Going to Rome around Easter time is probably one of the worst ideas. Well, we’ll see.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed, and I’ll definitely see you next week with a follow up on my Venice trip!

Until then, take care!

V