Beach Sloth

Encapsulate by Iris Karuna

                Childhood memories are the best ones. The first ones are best. You’re chilling as a baby. Everybody thinks you’re adorable. Do whatever you want at this part of your life. Nobody judges you. Anything you can think of gets put into the ‘cute’ category. Spit up on people. Oh yeah that’s cute. Make weird gurgling noise, once more cute. If you did anything you did as a baby as an adult there would be severe consequences. Babies get the ultimate free pass on behavior. They understand nothing: time, language, etc. All of it is completely meaningless. Ignorance for a baby is its greatest asset. Just look at ‘Baby Geniuses’ and its awfulness. By taking away the sole defining trait of the baby they no longer are cute. 

                Bites happen. This is part of the preschool life. Iris travels further down the line from childhood to adulthood. Relationships are hard. Imagine relationships as a child versus relationships as a kid, teenager, and adult. That’s tricky. Crushes from childhood are not easy, believe me. I know. Remember seeing crushes during my time as a mere child. Who liked me? I recall being cuter as a child. Of course that all happened before my voice dropped like a WUB in dubstep. WUBs are the new Ooosnes. Dubstep still confuses me. Someday I’ll get used to its drops and heavy bass. Until then I still have my classic dance records the things that played as I stood alone at a party watching everybody else have fun. Hope someday to go to a party where everybody accepts me. I have no idea when that party is going to happen. 

                Iris wants to be a transplanted organ inside of people. Will their bodies accept her as part of theirs? As a transplanted organ let me say that is a rough situation. Being somebody’s colon is not as easy as it sounds. Take it from me: you do not want to be somebody’s colon or pancreas. Find a better organ to take over. Be a stomach, be a heart. Or just be who you are. People like you when you’re a person versus you usurping their organs’ main functions. 

                Nostalgia ends it. Time capsules are made for students to see how their lives have changed. Small towns do it as a way of being ‘cute’. Find a box. Put a lot of random stuff in it. Uncover it years later when nobody cares. Yep it is a way of looking back at the past with biased emotional responses. Seems like a lot of work to just remember something all over again. That’s why we have memories, to look back on ourselves bathed in the hue of golden light, negatives blurred out as we remember the best moments of our live. 

                This is chapbook about love, about growing old, and, most importantly, about copulating Buicks.