My name is not one that is so easily forgotten. I’ve met faces
who shake my hand and admit that my name has a familiar ring. It
will wrap itself around your tongue,
take shelter in the grooves of your brain,
etch itself into your flesh,
and make a drumbeat of your pounding heart.

I am the red flowers that bloom in the Western Cape.
I am the violet quartz, the precious gemstone,
and I may be worn around your finger or wrapped around your
neck if the month of lovers breathed life into your lungs.

I am rooted in the grounds of Israel.
I was promised by God in the Hebrew tongue.
My blood is spread over the Middle East,
my complexion is of light-bathed soil,
and I am a unity of scattered heritage.

You cannot forget me, no matter how you may try.
I am cradled in the back of your mind.
I live in shades of red, from flowers to blood.
I live in shades of purple, from gemstones to sunsets.
I am the embodiment of love,
and I linger in every inch of this Earth.

I have locked myself inside of my car in the middle of the school parking lot.
I can still hear the ringing of the bell that caused us to scatter out of the school like ants escaping from a disrupted colony ringing in my ears. I am no longer a fire ant, but a caged animal, and I’m not sure who the metal barrier around me is supposed to be protecting. I still don’t feel safe.
I am thinking about how the glass at the zoos muffles the sounds of the animals, and how you might miss their cries unless you stopped walking and got right next to the glass. I don’t want to be seen, but, at the same time, I am hoping and waiting for people to stop walking past me, stand next to my car, and listen.
I am laying down in my back seat like a wounded animal, and my screams are being muffled by me burying my face into the seat. I no longer feel like a caged animal, but a fish inside of a tank. I don’t know how long I have been crying, but I feel like I am drowning. You can’t hear noises in the water unless you are below the surface yourself. I feel like I am the exhibit in the aquarium that everyone ignores because whatever’s in the water is hiding under a rock.
My head feels as though it will explode, I can’t breathe, everything is blurry, my chest hurts, I can’t stop crying, and I have convinced myself that I am dying. When my cousin was three, he would have died if my dad had not performed cpr on his blue, limp little body after he was pulled out of the pool. Now, he is eleven, and he knows how to swim, but I don’t have the heart to tell him that you don’t need water to drown.
Now, I am wishing that I had been the one that drowned that day.
I am sitting in a fish tank, I have no gills and I can not breathe.
My screams are silent, nobody can hear me, and I am kicking the inside of the car to try and make some noise, but everyone has gone home by now.
I am able to breathe again and I have grown a pair of lungs.
I am sitting in a zoo after closing hours, and all I can do is practice my roar and try to be heard again in the morning.

We are stuck in a memory, a time that no longer exists. Haunting the abandoned cavities of chests, the still chambers of hearts, we are living in a standstill. When we gather the courage to speak our piece, we are failed by the echoes reverberating off of hollow walls.
We are waiting for someone to break the back and forth, to hear something other than white noise,
the ticking of a clock,
and our worn out affections that have long since lost their worth.
We are ghosts living in the ashes of old flames,
until life is brought back into these bones,
or we are laid to rest in our graves.

Isn’t is strange how we notice things when it is too late?
This is probably the last time that all of us will be in the car together. There will be no more midnight drives from hillside theatres. No more 2am dinner plans at kerbey lane.
This is the first time that I have noticed that you twirl your hair when you drive. My eyes have shifted from cityscapes flying across backseat windows to watching you wrap your hair around your finger.
It’s not slow and flirtatious, but quick and desparate, as if you're trying to distract yourself from the fact that we are growing up. It’s making me anxious, but I can’t look away.
This is the first time that I noticed the change in our silence. We are driving down nearly empty highways, and we are leaving behind our time. We are no longer laughing, and this silence doesn’t feel like it usually does. For once, none of us have anything to say. Or maybe, we know that there is not enough time to say all of the things that we should and want to say.
This is when I noticed how much I love driving down empty highways at midnight. Everything is slow, there is no rush, and, for once, there are no expectations of me.
I am finally, truly noticing that there will never be enough time to tell you all that I love you,
to hear you talk about science,
to hear about your travels,
to talk to you about your struggles,
to drive, and laugh, and cry with you,
to watch you twirl you hair.
Now, we have grown up, and our distances will strain our years of friendships,
and there will never be enough time with you.

I often wish that I was still a child.
So many things change when we grow up.
Innocence becomes lost,
days become shorter,
the nighttime still scares me,
playing house becomes a game of survival,
boys become men, men become frightening,
I become sad, worried, anxious, and self-aware,
friends will lose their half of the necklace or their friendship ring,
being loved by someone will determine my worth,
I no longer feel small next to the kitchen counter,
but in the presence of everyone around me,
“Forever” loses its meaning,
everyone will eventually leave,
death is no longer a myth,
I will not smile as often as I did,
I will not cry as little as I did,
I will not feel safe in school anymore,
I will not go outside and play anymore,
I will try and pick the imperfections off of
my skin until it is red and bleeding,
**** in my stomach whenever I walk,
work myself into exhaustion,
feel overwhelmed by every task,
have anxiety attacks in public places,
and wish that I was a child again.

Sometimes, I feel like being a magician.
I’ll open my box full of wonders and curiosities, and I’ll pull out the stacks of old birthday cards that I have received throughout the years.
I’ll fan them out like a deck of 52.
If I had you pull out a card, I’d already know who it was by the way that your hand hesitated to touch it.
He writes his love on postcards, and she writes hers on lined paper.
You see, guessing who the cards are from is the easy part.
Making them reappear is what I haven’t mastered.