She was eating a banana in the produce section. I noticed because I’ve really been into the color yellow lately. I suppose you could say it’s my favorite color now. It was green for a long time due to my inebriation for nature. Then it was blue because I like lakes and water and the sky at times. But now it’s yellow. I want everything to be yellow … maybe it has something to do with the passing of time and the yellowing of memories, paper, photographs, peeling hallways, old wedding dresses, ghost faces in sun-dappled windows. Perhaps I’m preparing to become a ghost. For some reason I can see myself right now in military fatigues, dusty, war-torn, and I’m standing at a third-story window of a big old house that sits on a cliff overlooking the wild sea. It’s quiet and lonely and maybe I’m dead. Does that even matter to time at all? If I had existed or not? To anyone or any moments I may have affected? The world would have barely noticed. And now I can hear the war far off as I stand and look out through the dusty glass and I’m smoking a soldier cigarette, and the ash is long and precarious. Then there comes a knock from downstairs. Someone’s pounding on the door. I decide it won’t matter if I answer, and it won’t matter if whoever is knocking comes busting in. I’m here, but I’m gone. The yellow world out there is my maze and amazement.

By

Aaron Echoes August