The Pier Proposal / by Nyoka Eden

It wasn’t the marriage that Dawn couldn’t accept. It was the idea of being proposed to on a pier. She wasn’t the one getting married, that was Danaka, her best friend and a young, Japanese Pollyanna. She tried to explain it to her boyfriend, Mason, without using the word ‘Freud’ and instead used words he could easily digest. Words like “energy” and “vibration” and “aura” that were slowly falling into her own vernacular but when struck by the tongue, seemed to ring and then hang in the air as if unaccompanied. “I mean, what kind of energy or frequency do you think is created when you do something like that on something so, you know, phallic?” she asked Mason. He strummed a little, thought, then strummed again. “What’s her moon in?”

 

“I can’t remember, Pisces I think? I have her birth chart bookmarked, hold on.” She opened her laptop and pulled up the virtual list of things meant to be revisited, remembered. She found it ‘Natal Chart Report for February 16, 1994’ sitting between James Hillman’s Wikipedia page and an article on home remedies for urinary tract infections. “Her moon is in Taurus.” She looked up at Mason. Not missing a single strum he said “that’s perfect. I bet she loved the pier proposal. And honestly babe, she was probably so swept up in the moment that she didn’t care what she was standing on or how phallic it was.” He paused, pleased with himself, while Dawn left the room for a cigarette. Mason didn’t smoke. 

 

Stepping onto the front porch, her eyes immediately fell to the bench covered in a masterful display of Mason’s shirts and jackets. There had been a small storm the night before and he couldn’t stand the thought of their three farm cats braving it without something besides their own furry bodies to keep warm. Dawn thought about her friend Lee, who was a Taurus, for perspective but then reconsidered. Taurus was his sun sign. Mason had explained to her once that in reality a person’s sun sign mattered least because it only revealed how others saw them. Dawn wondered how Mason saw her. Dawn wondered if Mason could truly see her aura and if he could, she wondered if the hue was soft enough.