i have grown to love that smell, that salty sweet fishy smell that comes only from working a fourteen hour shift at a seafood restaurant in soho. it accompanies you when you walk in the door and i can tell how difficult your day has been based on how far away i am when i first start smelling it— sometimes, on stressful nights, i smell it from the hallway, other times, quieter ones,  not until i’m curled into the sweet soft place between your earlobe and your neck. i have grown to love that smell because it means you’re home. for the next twelve hours, until you go back to your fish, you will sleep next to me and be mine all mine.

let me tell you about six-year-olds.

a six-year-old has character, a constantly blossoming personality that distinguishes her from the rest of the six-year-olds in her class, in the world.  a six-year-old knows the lyrics to her favorite songs. she knows whether or not she likes broccoli and that barack obama is our president. she knows that the recycling goes out on mondays and what the word “pregnant" means. she’s been on an airplane and she probably knows how to operate an iphone. she loves her sisters and playing hot lava monster and watching finding nemo over and over. she’s learning to read and write and play the piano. 

a six-year-old has gotten twelve million time outs. she brushes her own teeth, a few of which are currently wiggly. she runs through sprinklers. she laughs and sings and talks back and pushes boundaries. she asks “why?" seventeen trillion times.

"i don’t know," we answer, one by one. 

"but why?" she presses.

six years is longer than the time you spent as an undergrad. it is longer than most relationships people in their twenties have ever had with anyone outside of their immediate families. six years is long enough to believe that the cancer isn’t coming back, and long enough for perishables to decompose and find their way back into the earth.

six years is an eternity. 

twenty children have been killed. most of them were six. one was named Charlotte. there is also Catherine, Grace, Noah, and Jack. Rachel, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, Dylan, Madeleine, Chase, Jesse, James, Grace, Emilie, Caroline, Jessica, Avielle, Benjamin, and Allison. 

a six-year-old has a favorite breakfast food. she rides bikes and dreams about what she wants to be when she grows up. she imagines weddings and graduations and feeds pretend bottles to babydolls. 

"why?" she asks.

jenny jones was seventeen,

every girl in the city,

every little boy’s dream.

jenny jones sat still and stared into the mirror. she thought about her foot on the pedal, what it would feel like to drop her heel to the floor. she thought about the fish bowl that she was living in, the fish bowl that she tapped her impatient knuckles against the smooth glass borders of each morning as she opened her eyes.

the fishbowl. the kool-aid. jump into the jell-o. 

life is like a box of cheez-its, she thinks. you stick your hand in and pull out seven hundred soldiers in uniform, each completely symmetrical and perfectly processed. no one breaks the code. 

jenny jones thinks long and hard about that pedal. she thinks about the fishbowl. she stuffs cheez-its in her mouth and decides to wait until tomorrow.