This post is about the girl who came to stay for a while.
Brown skin. Bright smile.
The girl who came to stay walked an uneasy road. Size and weight of a sparrow. Struggling for every inch of growth. Lungfuls of struggle breath. A beige/brown chick with protruding eyes and twig-thin legs. Gasping. Moving. Sometimes taking flight.
The girl who came to stay sprouted downy, fluffy wings. Determined. Navigated her backyard world. Sometimes she flew alone. Sometimes she flew with friends. Always, her mama watched. Seeing.
The girl who came to stay made her nest her home. Adorned with drawings, pictures, music, and books. Smells of home life. Sweet. Sour. Salty. Girl with big eyes and thin legs and impossible dreams. She. Was. Here.
The girl who came to stay accepted gold balloons that marked seventeen. Huge, helium-filled memory markers. Tied to brittle branches in front yard tree. People paraded. Gifted. Carded. Marked the final days of the girl who might not stay much longer.
Wavy, yellow curlicues. The remnants of ribbons from those seventeenth-year balloons. Helium-filled markers long gone. Deflated. Removed weeks before the girl lifted her downy wings and flew away.
For she had not come to stay.
Yellow ribbon curlicues remain twisted onto brittle tree branches. They wave to us from brown, naked limbs. On sunny days, they are yellow ribbons against a blue sky. Remind the watching mama that once upon a time there was a girl who came to stay, but not forever. And a mama. Who watched. Who saw. Who will never forget.
The girl who did not come to stay sprouted sparrow wings that took her higher and higher to the God from whence she came.
And in these days on earth. There is the mama. The family. The friends. The yellow ribbons. The blue sky. The memory of a brown-skinned, bright-eyed girl who did not come to stay after all.
But who will always, in some way, remain.