Marigold

Marigold

By Gabriella Cohen

Marigold Waylon was an enigma. She leased a bungalow but spent every night in a different hotel room. She owned dozens of shoes but was always barefoot. She lit up every room she entered but her own glow was faded. Marigold Waylon was a groupie. But she was also just a girl who didn’t know better. 

When I met her for the first time, I thought she was perfectly imperfect. Her highlighted hair clashed with her dark eyebrows, and her flowy blouse hid her bruised arms. Her first words to me were “I feel like I know you.” From the moment I set eyes on her I was enraptured, but I knew she’d always be out of reach. For the next twelve years though, I did anything to shorten the distance between us. On a freezing Tuesday night, she stood sweating on a backyard table and told me to join her. With her hands in mine, I abandoned reality and soared. I searched for light in her black-lined eyes, but I could only find a masked darkness. I thought I could learn to know her back then, but I recognize now that nobody could fully understand Marigold Waylon. Not even herself.

In the crowd of a show, she twirled and swayed and blew kisses to the band. In the bathroom of a bar, she puked and scrubbed away tears and reapplied her lipstick in dirty mirrors. In cigarette smoke filled backstage rooms, she smiled her gap-toothed grin and wiped the powder from her reddened nose. At afterparties, she poured glasses for strangers and saved half-empty bottles for herself. 

She yelled into the night that her mother named her for the color of the sunrise on the day she was born. She whispered in the morning that she had no mother.