Voice Like a Hyacinth

by Mallory Pearson

Was there a term for learning you hadn’t been as complete as you might have once imagined? For discovering shards of yourself? For seeing these people and knowing it at once, like the slow acknowledgment of a finger falling asleep. For learning the things that constructed their desires and their personalities and all the ways they fit with you, like interlocking fragments of a machine.

Coming evening sucked the afternoon from the sky with a straw, and now all that remained were thin dregs of clouds and pockets of white-blue fading into a pinkened gray.

I imagined that every relationship, platonic or romantic or some twist of the two, had the capability to leave you in reverence of it. You could only worship ordinary adoration for so long before it became sacred.

That’s the nature of art, Jo. You make it, and then you lose control. Interpretation is beyond your boundaries.