Mood Ring

I miss the 2000s—I miss the burnt CDs in a shoebox under my bed, and feeding the TV videos like a pet. Now, they eat nothing. They’re born without mouths. I miss mood rings and being told how I felt by something cheap. Mine used to turn red for romantic on the playground, and the girls with Goldilocks hair laughed at me. Red followed me everywhere after that. I stared at the sun for so long, its red would smatter my vision—like molten pomegranate seeds spilled from the navel of the sky. I feared they’d fall and set the world alight, so I shut my eyes, carried its soft ache hidden behind my eyelids.

Until one bedtime, I found the courage to tell my mum. She told me the seeds were tiny mistakes the eyes made while cleaning up the mess of too much light. She smiled so warm I felt I could tell her anything and all my pain would dissolve into not quite understanding the world. And so what if it was romance? What if all I knew was that I wanted the girl with Goldilocks hair? I didn’t know what that meant—to want—something that sat at arm’s length yet lived veiled away in another world. All the love I could have had. All the years spent waiting to be wrapped around a finger and filled with warmth.