Oct 2016
I remember the summer of 10th grade so clearly. I snuck you into my room and we laid under the covers for the entire three months. We talked about our favorite songs and the way the sun feels on our skin, about how things used to feel. We planned out every detail of our future together and played it out on Sims. You were so beautiful. You took over every room, you were so full.
My sheets still smell like you. Sometimes I play caterpillar with my blankets and it's almost like I can touch you. Like a familiar hug, you never liked to let go. As if saying goodbye was too hard, as if too many people tried to forget you.
My mom hasn't forgotten you. I remember her telling me about how she skipped school for you and how she decided to stay in bed for her entire junior year. I remember her telling me about how you weren't allowed in her room so she made space in her medicine cabinet instead.
Cleared shelves for you when she got her own place, wrote you into every divorce paper, mistook her name for yours. Stuffed you into breathing tubes for her son, tore off a piece of her, a piece of you for him. kicked you out when she found your residue on tinfoil, told you that she didn't raise you this way, said the wrinkles around your lips are unrecognizable and your cheekbones aren't carved the same.
She asks me why I've been scratching at my ribcage, why my fingertips can lay comfortably between them. She tells me that it's like looking in a mirror 20 years earlier. That my complexion is as faded as her high school yearbook. Washed out like a bottle of wine, like the one I held to my lips the night before. She tells me to eat an apple, tells me to pick up the one that fell to the ground, tells me to wash it off, to wash out the mouth, to empty it of alcohol, asks me not to carve holes through it, asks me not to rot like the other ones. Act like my body isn't being taken over by seeds, like my stomach doesn't boil when I hear his voice, like the only butterflies I feel aren't when I kick at my comforter. She tells me that if you don't leave room for depression, eventually he'll get the hint but in this family, if you fall hard enough, there's bound to be bruises.
My sheets still smell like you. Sometimes I play caterpillar with my blankets and it's almost like I can touch you. Like a familiar hug, you never liked to let go. As if saying goodbye was too hard, as if too many people tried to forget you.
My mom hasn't forgotten you. I remember her telling me about how she skipped school for you and how she decided to stay in bed for her entire junior year. I remember her telling me about how you weren't allowed in her room so she made space in her medicine cabinet instead.
Cleared shelves for you when she got her own place, wrote you into every divorce paper, mistook her name for yours. Stuffed you into breathing tubes for her son, tore off a piece of her, a piece of you for him. kicked you out when she found your residue on tinfoil, told you that she didn't raise you this way, said the wrinkles around your lips are unrecognizable and your cheekbones aren't carved the same.
She asks me why I've been scratching at my ribcage, why my fingertips can lay comfortably between them. She tells me that it's like looking in a mirror 20 years earlier. That my complexion is as faded as her high school yearbook. Washed out like a bottle of wine, like the one I held to my lips the night before. She tells me to eat an apple, tells me to pick up the one that fell to the ground, tells me to wash it off, to wash out the mouth, to empty it of alcohol, asks me not to carve holes through it, asks me not to rot like the other ones. Act like my body isn't being taken over by seeds, like my stomach doesn't boil when I hear his voice, like the only butterflies I feel aren't when I kick at my comforter. She tells me that if you don't leave room for depression, eventually he'll get the hint but in this family, if you fall hard enough, there's bound to be bruises.
