Green-Sky Thinking
She picks a patch of grass that looks like it has been saving a shape just her size. Backpack as pillow, jacket for shade, headphones around her neck so the park’s own soundtrack can win: sparrows, bicycle clicks, someone throwing a tennis ball badly and laughing anyway.
Clouds drift like slow notes. Ants practice crossing her shoelace. A breeze turns the pages of a book she isn’t reading, the way a friend might nudge your elbow when it’s time to go. She closes her eyes and the green behind her lids feels like a permission slip.
She promised herself she wouldn’t think about them. She thinks about them the way the body thinks about breathing when you try not to—sudden, obvious, everywhere. Their name arrives without knocking, tidy as a folded receipt in a pocket you forgot to check. She tries the usual tricks: counting leaves, naming birds, reciting the three herbs she can identify without getting sued by a recipe. The name keeps sitting down beside her, polite but heavy.
A dog stops to consider her like a strange kind of sunbather. She offers a hand; the dog decides she is furniture and leans. “Traitor,” its owner says, smiling, and the word feels like a joke with good posture. The dog leaves a damp crescent on her sleeve, a souvenir she doesn’t hate.
Overhead, a plane writes its own thought across the blue and moves on. She imagines the person she doesn’t want to imagine, also looking up somewhere, also seeing a white line fade, also deciding what not to text. The thought is a stubborn weed. She doesn’t pull it. She learns its shape.
She opens the book and lets the wind choose a page. A line waits there like it knew she’d come: What we don’t water grows anyway. She laughs once, the small kind you make when you accept a fact you can’t out-argue. She reads the line again and doesn’t underline it. Let the mind remember on its own for once.
The sun warms one knee, then both. A child in a red shirt names everything out loud—tree, sky, bug, mom—as if inventing the language by sheer insistence. She borrows that method: grass, breeze, cloud, pulse. She adds one more, just quiet enough for no one to hear: mine.
There is space now between the name and the thought of the name. Not a wall—walls invite knocking—but a meadow where it has to walk to reach her. By the time it gets there, it’s tired. She can look at it without flinching. “You’re not the worst thing,” she tells the thought. “You’re just not today.”
When she stands, the imprint she leaves is small and immediately begins to heal. She brushes off clover and returns the park to its own business. Somewhere, someone else is practicing not thinking. She roots for them in secret. Then she puts on her headphones and lets the music be about this, not them, and walks home with a pocket full of green.
