You wrote your name in my book
peeled a layer of my skin
and wore it like a shiny
pendant round your neck.
I bottled your sweat.
It sits tucked away
in a honey jar
on my highest shelf.
The trouble with having you
is that no one can.
Shall I build you a castle by the lake? Pack stone-filled mud into bright coloured plastic to shape its foundation. Should I splash through the cold water and pick pretty pink stones to decorate its walls? Do everything like the first time. I will call you Queen and address you as your Majesty or your Grace. I will bow. I will kiss your hand and we will laugh. We will laugh and hear the high-pitched echoes of our youth. I will feel the ghost of nerves and excitement wondering if I should kiss you. If you would like that. Would you still like that? The wind picks up and your hair moves with it. It whips from right to left. You push it from your face. Small lines near your eyes are the only visible changes from then to now. It is the face I wake up to. The first thing I see every morning when I open my eyes, but here it all feels new again. I want to ask you if you feel that too, but the way you are staring out at the water stops the words. I don’t want to break your concentration.
“Small lines near your eyes are the only visible changes from then to now.”
Shall I search the rocky shore for flat stones? Brush the dirt from their sides and pile them high so that we can spend the afternoon defying gravity skimming the water. I tried to impress you that day, but my first three tries landed with a heavy splash as if I had just opened my hand and let them fall. I could see the laughter pushing against your lips longing to be let loose, but you held them closed. Probably to protect my ego, but then you stepped forward and skipped your first stone three almost four times. I had hoped to step behind you and guide you like all the teenage boys in our year imagined doing. But there you were standing behind me, trying not to laugh as you showed me how to flick my wrist just right. There was so much laughter that day. I don’t know when we lost that. It would be easy to say that it died with him. Harder to admit it flickered out long before he existed. I want to ask you if you are thinking about him, but the tears in your eyes answer for me.
Shall I strip down and run quickly into the rippling water shivering until my body warms against the cold? The sudden exposure of flesh would send giggles past your lips. I would try not to shiver too noticeably so that you would come and join me. You would scream and laugh all the way in. You would wrap your arms around me and we would be happy again. We would let go of everything that has happened. We could do that you know? Here in the place where we started, we could start again. We could end our suffering and become new from our tragedy. After months of silence we could scream. Scream into the wind. Scream until our throats taste bloody. Let loose the pain, the anger, and the quiet that has settled between us. We could come together in this expulsion. Or will this be the end? Is this stop the setting of our conclusion? Will we build our castle by the lake? Or will we say goodbye in the place our little prince never got to see? Well – What will it be?
I still have the dead bouquet
from the wedding we went to
together in November. You
were the most handsome
woman there—your pants
grabbed at the places you
sought to conceal and I wore
that slip I got in France.
All the while wondering
what it must feel like to glide
on black ice towards the alter
in the parking lot I said “absolutely”
to smoking a joint in the car, responded
quite vaguely to your concerning gestures.
The stars are relentless flecks, I thought.
We joked about stealing the flower
arrangements and toyed with the idea
of marrying in the woods. We would
have no shoes and you agreed to wear
linen and I would just wait to feel good
in something with gauze. You only
casually noticed how I left at certain songs
or how I’d tense a little when the mother
delivered her “I can’t believe how beautiful -
you are” speech. The truth is, only you
noticed. Now the hydrangeas guard the
window in our apartment, reflecting stain –
colored sun. Mimicking silk,
they used to live once.
I don’t know when the room stopped being blue. I think it happened while I was in high school, when the room wasn’t being used as much. Mom thought it needed a facelift. The blue paint was replaced with floral wallpaper—hydrangeas with little green leaves. But we never stopped calling it the blue room.
We called it the blue room because it wasn’t quite a den, it wasn’t the living room, and it never fully became a storage space. “Just put it in the blue room,” became a well-known phrase in our family. When I was in elementary school, my parents filled a wardrobe in the room with art supplies and I used to paint watercolor oceans while sitting on the sun-warmed wooden floor.
Mom and I once spent an afternoon rearranging the furniture in the blue room. We cleaned out the shelves filled with everything from second grade spelling homework to forgotten about stuffed animals. At the time, we thought that if we cleaned up the room, which had become the family dumping ground for anything that didn’t fit in any other room in the house, we could make better use of it; it could be a place to relax, watch television, use the exercise bike gathering dust in the corner.
On the morning of the move I walked from room to room, saying goodbye to each space. I thanked our terracotta-colored kitchen where I learned to cook. I told the blue room I was sorry I stopped hanging out there after middle school ended. I opened every empty drawer in the bathroom I shared with my older brother and wished they were still filled with bottles of roll-on glitter and cracked palates of pale foundation.
“I told the blue room I was sorry I stopped hanging out there after middle school ended.”
I saved my bedroom for last. I stood in the center of the rectangular room, my feet covering a stain in the cream carpet. My mom tried to convince me against the pale color, knowing how stained it would become, but I insisted. Cream carpet and butter yellow walls and a twenty-year-old girl trying to say goodbye to a room without feeling like she was saying goodbye to the life lived within it.
I wanted so badly to sit down. But I knew if I did, I wouldn’t be able to pry my body from the floor to walk down the stairs and out the front door (but we never use the front door) and into the packed car where my dad was waiting, impatiently, to drive me away from our home for the last time and drop me back at school where I was living for the summer because I wanted to, but also because the rental house wasn’t ready yet so my family was technically homeless.
I stood in the center of the room and couldn’t think of anything to say besides goodbye and I’ll miss you, and when I said “I’ll miss you,” I started crying despite how hard I had been trying to keep the sadness in the back of my throat where it was aching to come out.
The car was packed with everything we couldn’t fit into boxes, including our cat, who was perhaps the most traumatized by the move. My dad thought it was a good idea to let him out of his crate during the drive, and he immediately crawled under the front passenger seat and got stuck between two metal bars. He moaned deeply and quietly until we were able to pull over and get him back into his crate, where he continued to cry out in misery for the rest of the drive.
“He just needs time, he’ll adjust.” Dad said without taking his eyes from the road. I mumbled my response, no longer able to control the burning-hot tears blurring my vision and streaking my face with salt.
I noticed the zipper on the back of Jerry’s neck when I kissed him there a year ago. I politely ignored it as his hands ran up and down my back, tapping “would you like to take me to your bedroom.” I turned out the light to get myself to stop staring at the zipper’s pursed lips.
“I have something to tell you,” Jerry says. He always wears gold arrow cufflinks when he thinks he’s going to say something that hurts. I tip what’s left of the wine glass down my throat before grabbing the loose skin around my waist and begin to pull up.