CW: contains drug use

"Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

Mona always seemed to know exactly what was needed. We called her “Wicked-Smart,” she was so freaking annoying. You’d ask about the sky and she’d talk about bees, ffs. For days! Nothing but endless chatter about bees, honey, nectar… And please don’t mention horses or cheese!!! Everything was always “jelly” or “gouda.” Fuck, she drove me batty! But she did… Know things. And she was kind, ya know?

Anytime someone had a headache, she’d pull willow bark from her bag. When she was a kid, she put oregano oil on her dog’s skin growth for days; damnedest thing, within a week, the growth was gone. She found herself in a bathroom once, high af on coke, and had a moment of absolute clarity:

“If I continue to do this, I will cease to exist.”

So she walked out of the bathroom stall, wiped her cell spotless and cold quit all the coke and meth and x and a bunch of other shit. This was not something you do. I mean: this was dangerous. But, she said:

“That’s just not me anymore…” and she shrugged.

We all kinda thought it wild that after three months sober, she turned up two months pregnant. Some of the people she cut off she loved deeply, she knew them before the buzz kicked in, they’re gone now, though more often they returned, months or years later, healing. “Some souls are kites,” she says, and she watches them as they dip and soar. She blinks the porch light on three times before it starts to rain. She still lights candles in windowsills, she says, “So they know love’s awake.”

She always just kinda “shook off” what didn’t fit. She said it was because of her twitches. She always twitches. She nailed me in the nose once~ accidentally of course; she did give me fair warning, telling me “left!” but I misunderstood and was too slow. She said “the twitches used to be just inside, then outside little, then outside big, then bigger than Boaz!” I don’t get it. She accidentally fell into a fishpond once when her mind went slantwise and her body jumped back, though wildly enough, she had salt tablets in her pocket which corrected fish-killing algae that had plagued the pond for months.

Weird things like that always happened around her~ to many, being around her felt like controlled chaos, giving that slight “whomp whomp” nauseous feeling, like a sudden elevator drop. She said some twitches were “on the inside,” and if she followed that twitch, things usually worked out. That’s not to say nothing bad ever happened. But she said the “bad stuff” helped her more easily recognize when something was “For Real.”

I don’t really get it… well maybe kinda, but she told me to close my eyes and ask myself what I wanted and all I heard was “Taco Bell.” I can’t explain it so well. She could just look at you and know you needed an orange. And she’d slide her eyes over ya, pull out that damned worm-hole of a bag, “Thinkin’ Milk Thistle. Your liver will thank ya!,” and slip you a gummy if you said, “Sure.”

She’d bring presents from crows and messages from cardinals. The birds were kinda cool, I guess. But then she’d shake her head at me and pull tacos from her bag, sit on the stoop and look up, offer me one.

I saw her climb deep into her bag once. She lived there for two years. When she finally came out, her hair was grayer and more wild, her back was even more bent, her body was broken, she rarely slept. She asks, “wanna water?” with a Mona Lisa smile, diving once again in the fish pond- this time on purpose.