A Girl Named Zinnia

She blinked her eyes open.

Her gaze stayed unfocused for a beat. She rubbed her eyes blocking out the blurry golden afternoon light.

Her eyes started to refocus and the room came into sharp detail.

Dust particles floated lazily through the shafts of warm autumn sunlight that streamed through her gossamer curtains. The tendrils of a friendly green houseplant reached across the window sill and spilled down the side of the wall.

She stared at one particular leaf for several minutes not moving a muscle, contemplating her day.

Every morning she ran a mental checklist through her head of all the things she needed to complete in the next 24 hours. Pack she thought. Pack, clean, say goodbye. Her lists were usually longer than this.

She mulled over the words in her head a few more times, concentrating on the quivering leaf. Say goodbye.

She rolled over in her queen-sized lilac bed to glance at the time. The antique analog clock read 4:35 P.M. This is why she never took naps. The awkward two to eight-hour time warp that a nap can take you down always left Zinnia feeling discombobulated and drained. Never refreshed.

She believed in early mornings and prompt bedtimes. 5 A.M. was a normal time for Zinna to get out of bed. The earlier the better she figured. She took the phrase “The early bird gets to worm” to a whole new level.

The dawn was her time. She claimed it. She preferred sunrises to sunsets; she always preferred the company of the early birds to the night owls. She adored how alone she was in the early morning. To her, there was nothing better than being the only one awake for miles and miles. Wide awake while the rest of the world sleeps.

Laying on her back, staring at the ceiling, Zinnia stretched her lanky arms out in front of her. She flexed her fingers open and close and examined her rings. Thick metal bands flashed in the sun.

She wore gold and silver and bronze jewelry. She believed everything went together.

This belief extended to her well-stocked closet which was chock-full of every fabric, shape, size, and design. She believed in the power of retail therapy. Thrifting only, of course.

Zinna was a strong advocate for sustainable fashion. She was a strong advocate for sustainable everything, in fact. Nature was her oasis and the thought of human beings disrespecting and destroying that oasis made her blood boil. Her mind drifted to thoughts of the giant trash pile that floats somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and let out an exasperated sigh. It was time to start moving.

She tossed the covers off her legs and hopped out of bed. Scratching her head and yawning, she pushed open her bedroom door and padded down the hall. The ancient hardwood floors creaked under her feet as she made her way to the spiral staircase that leads to the kitchen. The cold metal of the stairs met her bare feet abruptly causing her to shiver and wish she had thought to put socks on.

She loved her kitchen. It was an old farmhouse-style kitchen with a butcherblock island in the middle of the space. Most of the wall was windows. The wooden window grids, cabinets, and island were painted what once must have been a stately white, but were now peeling and cracking making the room feel forgotten. Dried herbs hung above the deep porcine sink. Rosemary, thyme, and sage. The most important of the herbs Zinnia thought. Her mother sold all kinds of farm goods at the local farmer's market. Bunches of lavender hung from the ceiling as well as hand-dipped beeswax candles.

The kitchen always smelled luxurious to Zinnia. There were no better combinations of smells in the world she thought to herself.

She rummaged around in the icebox to pull out fresh eggs, creme, and cheese.

As far as she could remember, her mother had always had bees, chickens, and vast organic gardens. She loved it. It always guaranteed the freshest ingredients for a well-deserved post-nap afternoon snack.

She stood over the gas oven and sparked up the front burner. She placed a skillet over the flame, sliced off a slab of butter, and tapped it into the pan. As the butter began to melt, she lifted and rotated the skillet to grease the entire surface. Setting it back down, she reached over and grabbed two eggs. In one precise movement, she cracked both the eggs open on the side of the counter and plopped them into a bowl. She whisked the eggs until they were frothy and she added a splash of creme and a sprinkle of cheese. Checking to ensure the skillet was hot, she poured the mixture into the pan. It sizzled on contact. While she waited for the eggs to congeal, she focused her attention on the handful of basil leaves and cherry tomatoes waiting on the island. She unsheathed one of her mothers cooking knives and chopped the basil into thin ribbons. She halved the cherry tomatoes. Using both hands to scoop up the additives, she quickly moved them over then pan and dropped them in the middle of the egg mixture. Without hesitating, Zinnia brandished a metal spatula, flipped the omelet to the other side, and smiled at the perfectly cooked side that turned up.

Her stomach growled. Her mind wandered.

Zinnia glanced up wistfully from her omelet. This was the last omelet she would cook in this house. She gazed out the window and contemplated her yard.

It was much more than a yard. They lived on three acres. The front half of their property was woods, the side portion, the side the kitchen looked out over, was meadows, and the back half was her mother’s farm and gardens which eventually gave way to more woods. Zinnia sometimes saw families of deer peacefully grazing out in the meadows. The fawns made her heart happy.

This was her home. This crumbling two-story farmhouse was all she had ever known. She knew every nook and cranny of the place. She would miss her mother’s familiar paintings that took up a majority of the wall space in the living room, hallways, and bathrooms. She would miss the copious amounts of house plants that lined every windowsill and smiled at her when she came home. She would miss the creaky floors and the drafty windows. Her lower lip started to quiver.

Suddenly, Zinnia found herself on the floor, knees hugged to her chest, silent tears streaming out of her eyes. She couldn’t fight the wave of melancholy and nostalgia that washed over her. It was too much. She let out an audible sob.

Her childhood. She was about to leave her childhood home and she would never return.

The smell of burning eggs brought her back to her senses. She angrily wiped her eyes and stood up so fast she got dizzy. Bracing herself against the stove she maneuvered the skillet off the lit burner and surveyed the damage. One side of the omelet was blackened. So much for her afternoon snack. She had lost her appetite anyhow. She dumped the remainder of the egg dish into the compost and set the skillet in the sink. Cold water meeting the hot surface caused steam to erupt from the pan fogging the window. She thought about her schedule. Pack, clean, say goodbye.

Brushing off her grief, Zinna scampered back upstairs and flung open her bedroom door. The first thing on her list was pack. Her suitcases were stuffed in the downstairs closet along with millennia of other clutter.

Before she could get down to business she needed music.

Zinnia believed in music. She adored music. Her mother was the one who introduced her to the fantastical world of records. There was a massive turntable downstairs that had sat collecting dust for as long as Zinnia was alive. When her mother was sad she would take out her blues albums, make a selection, and drown herself in red wine to the key of G. Zinnia knew what to do on those nights. Hole herself up in her room and listen to the sorrowful voices sing about lost love and hopeless dreams. She would close her eyes and wish her mother to be happy. But she knew no matter how hard she wished her mother would never get over the death of her father and no matter how much she wished her mother would stop drinking, Zinnia knew.

Her mother was broken. She broke the night Zinnia’s father crashed his car and never came home. Her mother would never be happy.

Zinnia sorted through the milk crates of record albums. She had a song stuck in her head and she sang the lyrics softly as she hunted “Can’t you hear me knockin’ on your window / Can’t you hear me knockin’ on your door, Can’t you hear me knockin’ down your dirty street, yeah … “

“Found it!” she exclaimed loudly to no one.

She pulled The Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers out from the collection and slipped the shiny black record out. Carefully setting it down on the recording player, she gently let the needle fall and Mick Jaggers’s iconic voice filled the empty house. Finally, she thought, I can concentrate. She shook out her mane of golden locks that fell just below her waist and took a deep breath.

Snapping in time to the rhythm she sized up the downstairs closet. She gingerly turned the knob and immediately regretted it. An avalanche of papers, old coats, forgotten art projects, and presumably suitcases knocked the poor girl down and buried her.

She moaned. That would leave several bruises.

She hauled the clutter off her lap and began sorting through the miscellaneous items. Most of the larger objects were sculptures, started and abandoned by her mother, but the majority of the clutter was random stuff long forgotten in the back of the closet. Hat, teddy bear, rain jacket, rain boots, oar, Halloween costumes, candles, photo albums. She took a mental checklist of everything that passed her fingers as she adventured deeper and deeper into the closet, clearing a pathway barely large enough for her to sidestep through. After digging her way through an entire paper mache rendition of the galaxy, she finally reached the back of the closet and voila. Her suitcases.

Their floral fabric was faded and dust had settled into every crevasse. Lugging all three of them out kicked up so much dust that Zinnia stood in the doorframe sneezing for several minutes before she regained her composure. She brushed off as much dust as she could before selecting the roomiest one to drag upstairs first.

Two trips later all three tired-looking suitcases sat in the middle of her room. She strutted over to her closet and opened the dutch doors. She had no idea how she was supposed to fit her entire wardrobe into three suitcases but she was determined to try. She figured she would choose her best pieces and donate the rest. I have my whole life to acquire new things, she thought.

Last night she had felt okay about giving up her clothes but now, standing in front of her closet and all its glory, she wasn’t so sure.

Zinnia bit her lip.

Each article had a memory attached to it.

The paisley blouse she thrifted down on Second Ave the day her first poem had been published in the local paper. The orange corduroy bell bottoms she had scored the last time she had flown to LA to visit her cousins. The oversized Levi jean jacket that had belonged to her dad. She massaged the denim material between her thumb and index finger. Her eyes misted again and she struggled to fight back the second round of tears. She felt the wave of the melancholy crash around her and stared hard at the floor.

One thing Zinnia had never learned how to do was pull herself out of her own head.