cliché musings

Dove liked to wonder how deep the sky ran.

At some point, of course, sky would turn to the endless chaos of space, but when does order end and chaos begin? The sky was confined to the limitations of Earth, to reflections of light and clouds pulled by wind, and at the same time its body reached out and blended with the rest of the universe.

She thought the sky deserved to be with its full entity. 

Dove laid on the dirt ground, head tilted up to the sky. Or space. Either worked. The branches on the trees spread across the blue landscape, with thorny edges and leaves blanketing underneath. Fading sunlight filtered through the cracks of the limbs that sway in the breeze — as if the tree bid goodbye to the sun before settling below the horizon. The sun smiled, waving back in time with the tree as its rays crossed over Dove’s face.

She watched this embrace for a few quiet moments. The singing birds were quiet too:, perhaps they were also curious about the dance of sun and the tree. She sat up and reached to the ground for her journal. The cover was cracked, the cornet bent inwards, and words, etched in ink by Dove herself, were scribbled across the skin. She turned to the first blank page and wrote, “The sun likes the sky. The sky likes the trees. The trees like the sun.”

She didn’t know what she was going to do with it. No radio would play a song about trees, unless it was more like, “You and me are trees, baby, oh yeah,” and she couldn’t return home with dignity and without a radio hit. 

Home, she thought, and jotted it down beside sun.

She liked it anyway, and that was why she’s here. Satisfied, she stood up and, brushing the dirt and crumpled leaves from her jacket, headed west, by way of the sun. 

* * *

Dove’s mother followed her ever since she was pushed out of the womb. Which wasn’t by her mother’s choice, Dove believed, pushing her out. Those nine months of sustaining her daughter’s nutrience, her soul, of feeling her presence pressed and kicking between her ribcage, must have brought a sense of comfort. Wherever Mother went, Dove was forced to accompany her : the best time of her mother’s life. She liked to think every time her mother gagged at the smell of sushi or felt a nagging tension on her bladder at all hours of the day, Dove smiled, pulling on the umbilical cord and making her marionette dance.

After Dove was born, and her mom could no longer feel her baby’s presence, she became territorial. If her mother couldn’t watch Dove while she slept, she only stared at the wall, wide awake, wary of lurking burglars, meteor crashes, and giant snakes. She might have stood over her crib, tangled dark hair falling in front of her, half-sunken eyes glued to Dove’s curled form. Sometimes Dove imagined her silhouette floating above her infant body, staring down with two dark pupils that pierced her guise. 

Dove’s wails for attention were met by gentle reassurance and soft arms, coos to calm her down and remind her she was safe. Her mother was crucial to Dove’s survival; her father had to pack it up and leave, less than two years in, offended and brushed aside over raising his own daughter. It did little to dampen her mother’s affections. 

Dove liked to imagine that was how it went, anyway. And it was probably why, like her dad, she needed to leave, too.

She fled to the West, where you didn’t need to tell mothers where you were going. You just went. Out here could return to your shitty apartment—the one that will end up costing you more than a house in the Midwest, with water damaged ceilings, no laundry units, and dysfunctional air conditioning in desert heat, but you didn’t care because at least it was yours. There were no questions to answer at the end of the day. Dove would collapse on her bed and sleep until two in the afternoon, not pull the sheets back on her mattress or put the dishes away. There was no mother to bring her a packed lunch, to insist on picking out a Prom dress or apply her makeup. Out west, Dove felt like a puppet snipped free. But maybe Dove was too harsh. Her dad texted her at random, and each short conversation ended with Talk to your mother, please. Though Dove couldn’t rationalize the catharsis of denying this request: I can’t make it back for Christmas or I’m too busy to call back today. It felt like her mother’s very DNA was finally washed away, levitating from Dove’s bones and flitting away in the California air. For as long as she could remember, Dove had wanted to make it in Los Angeles. She got lucky and made friends in the right places, despite her desperate attempts to be jaded and cavalier. Sometimes, in interviews, she was asked for her advice to any hopeful musicians out there. Hard work gets you nowhere, she would say. You work too hard and you burn out. Be smarter.

She would feel proud of herself, too, smug, almost. But the interviewers’ faces would always change, morph into a silhouette and pale glow, with dark pupils bearing into her The mouth – slit-like – would open and close in speech, but Dove never heard a thing. Dove’s manager would then pull her own strings and rush her client from the room. Onto the next thing.

Dove didn’t realize that burnout happened regardless. The less she did, the more difficult it became to do the same, and melancholy set it. This sadness burrowed itself in the memories of Mother and feasted until it was more of her than she had been when her sneakers hit the pavement of LA.

So Dove was home now, five years later. A stint across the country can get boring when you run into a pattern, where you can guess someone’s inheritance by one look at their shoes and what they order at a smoothie bar. Los Angeles was the most predictable of all.

“Darling,” her mother said, when Dove appeared on her doorstep. “What happened?”

Dove smiled. She must have already heard. It would be impossible not to. 

“Nothing,” Dove replied. It was better than something. “I needed a break.”

* * *

Dove sat herself at the dinner table.. Her mother was in the kitchen, bent over and rummaging through a cabinet, metal pans clanging against each other.

“What would you like for dinner?” she said. “I was going to order pizza, but I doubt an L.A. girl would enjoy that. You look skinny. You haven’t gone vegan, have you?”

“I’m not,” Dove said. “Whatever you want is fine.” 

“Have you talked to your father? He’ll want to see you, too. I hardly recognize you. When’d you get all those tattoos?”

Dove looked down at her arms. She saw more of the black drawings than skin. They were silly, she knew, like the piece of toast on her ankle, the alien head on her shoulder, sexy on her collarbone. 

“I’ve had them,” Dove said.

“What about–” She was interrupted as pans and skillets toppled onto the kitchen tiles. She stood up, strings of hair falling out of her bun, holding a wok. “I’ll make stir fry instead,” she announced. “Your favorite. But what about those interviews and signings coming up? I thought you wouldn’t be able to make it home for the rest of the year.”

Stir-fry wasn’t her favorite and hadn’t been for a long time.. “I’m cancelling everything.”

“Oh, darling.” Her mother had called her darling twice.. It was her favorite word. Dove hadn’t heard it once moving. “Is it that bad?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked.”

“I think they’re much too harsh on you. So who cares? All that matters is what you think, and if you think you did the right thing.”

“Does that mean I shouldn’t care what you think?”

Her mother didn’t say anything, filling the silence with the clicking of the stove while the gas lit the burner.

“What about that boy?” she finally said. “I never got to meet him.”

Dove declared then that she was tired from traveling.. She made her way upstairs and into bed. 

* * *

She went back to the trees the next day. It was cloudy and she couldn’t see the sun, so she followed the trails of gray in their wisps, trying to find the areas where one shade turned to the next. he different puffs clumped and moved as one across the sky: darker now, they obscured the blue. 

She didn’t know why, but she had the urge to text Natalie. im back, she sent.

She watched the screen, not blinking for as long as she could, but no text came immediately. She closed it and placed it on her chest, turning back to the clouds. Soon she couldn’t tell the difference between the gray of the sky and the black behind her eyelids, and then the black once again changed to a sea of gray. No, white, wrinkled sheets. A hotel bed. She felt exhausted and needed to collapse, but the mattress was too hard, like rocks, like sleeping on the ground. A face appeared over hers. It was him. We should get married, he said. But his skin was too gray, and a pale light started to appear around him. She screamed, kicking him in the chest and scrambling off the mattress, pulling the sheets to the floor. She was standing in front of a large window, the pale light coming from outside, flashing, a camera. She was at least ten floors up and a camera was angled in her face. She thought she could hear yelling, dozens of voices chatting over each other, but she couldn’t make out a single world. She covered her eyes and turned away, and he was there again, holding her hands and pulling them away from her face. It’s okay, he said. They’re gone. She looked over again, and they were gone. But the window was looking out over her house, her mother’s house, the front yard. Was that her mother with the camera? She spun around in the room, but it was still a hotel. Unfamiliar. And when she came back to the window, it was black outside. Only her reflection shone through. But her eyes were dark, and her hair fell over her face.

Dove took a sharp breath, eyes opening. The clouds were back again, and the trees, and her back and shoulders were stiff because of the hard ground and not a mattress. She checked her phone and only an hour had gone by, but she’d received a text from Natalie.

and?, it read.

Dove pushed herself up, crossing her legs over and hunching over her phone.

im at the spot

The next text came two minutes later.

why the fuck are you texting me 

im sorry, Dove replied. can we talk?

She waited ten minutes but there was no response.. She sighed and stood up, attempting to pat down the knots in her hair and pulling out a twig, when she heard footsteps.

Natalie was coming down the path. She had pink hair, Dove had seen on Instagram, but not like this, not darkened by an overcast sky and shade of leaves. Dove could pick out her purple lipstick, the black sweater with holes in the sleeves, brown eyes dull and joyless..

“Hi,” Dove said. It seemed the easiest.

“You are back,” Natalie said. 

She missed her voice; so much. 

“Everyone’s talking about you dumping your fiancé.”

“I don’t know why I’m so worried then, if that’s the biggest topic of discussion.”

“Why am I here?” Natalie crossed her arms. Her eyes weren’t on Dove anymore, looking behind her shoulder. “Why are you here?”

Dove wasn’t entirely sure herself. “It’s my spot,” she said quietly.

“Jesus Christ,” Natalie groaned. “Are you kidding me right now?”

“Is it so bad that I wanted to see you?”

“Yes, it is that bad. I don’t care anymore. Neither did you.”

The rustle of the trees filled Dove’s ears. The wind blew over them both, Natalie’s baggy sweater and pink, pink hair flapping around. It reminded her of when they used to lay on the ground together, and Dove showed her the lyrics she wrote in her journal, Natalie’s hair flying behind her ears as the gusts picked up. Her eyes would glow with the sun and tell her that her words were beautiful, she should really think about recording these one day. 

“That’s not true,” Dove said.

“Then what is true? That everyone realized you’re a fraud and you thought you could come back here to loving and accepting arms?”

Dove squeezed her eyes closed.“I had enough. I had to come back. And I feel bad.”

“Feel bad for what?”

“Abandoning you. It was never about you.”

“God, your mom. You’re obsessed. Maybe you should talk to Freud instead of me.”

“I hate LA now,” Dove tried to explain. “I had to be a certain thing, and then everyone expected me to be that thing. I thought I could be different, with the album, but everyone just hates it.”

“It’s mediocre,” Natalie said. “That’s what the reviews say, anyway.”

“And what do you think about it?”

She sighed. “What were your songs about? Not on that album. The first one.”

Dove’s fingers froze. “You know,” she whispered. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“I want to hear you say it.”

Dove opened her mouth. She didn’t know what she was going to say. She knew, she thought. What else could she say? It didn’t matter, because Natalie didn’t have brown eyes anymore. They were black. And her hair wasn’t pink, it was tangled and dark. A soft light pulsed around her body, and Dove felt a scream tickling the back of her throat more than she could think to let out, It was you. About you.

* * *

Back home, with her mother, Dove sat at the kitchen table and watched her make stir fry. Again. She enjoyed moving her fingers along with her mother’s gestures across the kitchen, a flick of the wrist as she picked up a spatula, a twirl of her index finger as she sprinkled salt on julienned vegetables and chicken.. She was the only thing Dove could control, it seemed. Her mother was so predictable – a comfort. 

Dove thought about a set of marionettes, how if you raised the right hand of one the left on the other also lifted, or using the strings to make them dance or smile or talk as one. Even if they turned away and couldn’t see each other, if they would still mimic each other’s actions. 

She wondered what puppets would do if they didn’t want to be controlled anymore. They didn’t have a choice. But maybe they could act out, throw a punch here and there just because they wanted to. The other puppet, of course, would just have to do the same thing, but it was a small price to pay for a sense of agency.

When dinner was ready, her mother brought her a plate, standing over her with a slight smile. Her hair couldn’t fall in her face, not when she always had it tied up. The kitchen was lit overhead, and her eyes were a sharp blue.

“Thank you,” Dove said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” her mother said.

It was a balance, and that was all Dove wanted.