042/100 aka 182/365

CHE
Word Count: 362

She once shaved her head and renamed herself “Che.” They threw her out of Sociology for boisterous behavior. The last time she started with a cry for revolt from the top of the desk. Some joined in because it looked like fun and because young blood needs its own veins to travel. She had a tattoo of a raised fist on her butt and of a chain on her breast. She didn’t go to her own graduation. It was in protest, of course, but nobody noticed her missing.

After college she only changed strategy, not course; she voiced her views over wine with friends and at small town meetings in hot crowded rooms where the chairs were meant to elude comfort in every position. She learned to bite back opinions in the office. She learned not to vent to a lover. She realized hair that was long was as easy as cropped and that no one but a lover would admit it was feminine and sensual. Symbols like this lost their meaning. Required no fight anymore.

People passed through the hole of her life, rarely getting hooked on a nail. She never wondered, never held on, let their spirits go free from her tether. Men and even a woman slept in her bed but just long enough to weave loneliness into the sheets. Her friends slipped away into families and out of her reach.

She was forty-six and sometimes something inside her still flared up like heartburn, a bubble that comes up as a burp. When she opened her mouth to let it out as a speech, no one was there to hear it. She turned around and looked behind her, at the trail she had walked and she peeked into the rooms she had filled and she knew she had to make a decision.

Nowadays, in her sixties, retired and demure, she can be seen picking plump tomatoes in her garden, gathering green beans and collards and kale. In her mind she is waging both sides of a war, but if you drive by and wave, she will look up and smile. On her mailbox is the single name “Che.”