But from now on, it’s all about sunshines and rainbows.
She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence here with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.
I’m learning that it’s good to think about what scares you. To bring it into the light. Even to hold it in your hands, if you can, and feel how it can’t hurt you anymore. To think of it and say, ‘I am not afraid.
We are different people now, yes, but those girls were magic.
Nobody’s crazy here. We just see different things.
We are all humans; we all wake up messy and confused.
There will be a night, some night, I am sure of it, when the mystery of all of this won’t be so difficult anymore. None of us will ever understand all of it, but you will not be in the dark.
I took the chain between the tips of my fingers, lifted it to the light. Each delicate link sparkled in the sun. It would have been lovely on anyone’s wrist. It would have been precious, with or without me. But it was everything I wanted, because I chose it to be mine.
I became aware, then, of the way I moved through the world. No unusual scars or crooked bones. Nothing about the way I looked at first glance that gave me away. I wondered who had done that to him. Who had left it untreated.
A leap. Look how precious you were. A spin. How worthy of love you were. A dip. Look at your heart, intact. Reach to the sky. What a miracle it was. Swoop to the grass. How steadily it beat for the people you loved.
Sometimes when my favorite songs are on I have to stop what I’m doing and lie down on my carpet and just listen. I feel every word they’re singing. Every note. And to think that in twenty years, or ten years, or five, even, I might hear those same songs and just, like, bob my head or something is horrible. Then I’m sure I’ll think that I know more about life, but it isn’t true. I’ll know less.
I sit next to Violet and hold her hand. I sit next to Wyatt and dab glitter on his cheekbones. I sit next to Lehna and make dinner plans for after graduation. I sit next to Greer and tell them I loved their poem. I sit next to Mark and say, “Let’s know each other like this for a very long time.
But it turns out that even the fiercest denial can’t stop time” -Marin.
Gramps set up that tree every year. He pulled out the decorations his dead wife and dead daughter bought and pretended to be a man who had lost too much and survived it. He pretended, for me, that his mind and his heart were not dark and convoluted places. He pretended that he lived in a house of me, his granddaughter, for whom he baked and often drove to school and taught important lessons about how to treat stains and save money, when really he lived in a secret room with the dead.
The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn’t a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to repeat the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.
I knew you were the kind of person I wanted to know. But what I didn’t know yet was that you can tell a girl you want to hang out with her because she said something smart. So I looked for an excuse to talk to you, and I found one.
I’m just afraid that one day something’s going to catch me by surprise. Stale coffee. Squares of American cheese. Hard tomatoes, so unripe they’re white in the center. The most innocent things can call back the most terrible.
We were so innocent and we didn’t even know it. There’s no way of getting it back. The confidence. The easy laughter. The sensation of having left home only for a little while. Of having a home to return to.
The common man pays for the internet,” he went on. “He pays for cable, for Christ’s sake! Because he needs more and more and more! Like anyone could watch one hundred channels. What good is a life if you live it like that? Glued to a lightbox showing you pictures. Telling you when to laugh and what to fear. The common man lives this way because he has lost the intuition of our ancestors. All you need in order to live is this.” He took two fingers and pressed them to my mother’s wrist.
I thought he never lied to me. I thought I knew who he was, but he was a stranger all along, and how do I mourn a stranger? And if the person I loved wasn’t even a person, then how can he be dead?