Feb 2022
You’re fifteen, and you're stuck in traffic.
You’re not driving, because you’re fifteen—that’s the bus driver’s job, to lay one hand on the gear stick and the other on a forehead baptized by summer, smoothing down car horn wrinkles and green-light degree burns.
Everything can be put down into numbers, except maybe infinity, or the amount of places where someone else is digging an elbow or a knee into you. You break the picture of it down into germs, then cells, then atoms, and let the flyspeck of it distract you from the fact it’s someone else’s bone making itself home into your skin, a tic-tac-toe played on your calves between the knees of a man going home and a woman clocking out of work, as they leave your legs in carnation X's and O's, all red wilting blotches, and one of their shoulders fits like a tetris piece between two chunks of your spine to stroke it periwinkle, a small blue sorry excuse for a bruise.
The song playing in your ears loops again. It’s the only thing you've been listening to for the last week and you don't think you can tell when it begins and when it ends anymore, and it's possible you can hear it even when your earphones are off. (They’re on, right now. You know it so because you can feel the ache of them against the jelly bone of your ears’ shell. Or maybe the ghost of a feeling has fooled you once and shamed on you.)
It's finals season and you feel like you're wasting every minute you're not staring at the flow chart on the bottom of your backpack. Something about cells, and one of them having a heart while the other one doesn’t. (This is your first year of university. You can’t be fifteen. Maybe you just feel like you are. Fooled you twice, shame on you.)
You're eighteen, and you’ve lived with yourself long enough to know you can't stop thinking, but why can't it ever be something good? Like remembering the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells without needing to look at a flow chart (which is the one with the heart?), or like figuring out what's the opposite of motion sickness—this nausea you feel from being too still in an unmoving bus (if i give it a name, does it mean it wins?).
You’re eighteen and you can’t help breaking touch into germs and atoms—like you’ll either get sick from it or survive it long enough to study it under a microscope—and you call cells’ nucleuses hearts—as if the real term for them is something to guard your naivety from, a word too crude for a girl made of carnations and periwinkles, no thorns and eggshell frail.
You’re eighteen. How about you baptize yourself, elbow your way out of the crowd and drive the bus for once?
You’re not driving, because you’re fifteen—that’s the bus driver’s job, to lay one hand on the gear stick and the other on a forehead baptized by summer, smoothing down car horn wrinkles and green-light degree burns.
Everything can be put down into numbers, except maybe infinity, or the amount of places where someone else is digging an elbow or a knee into you. You break the picture of it down into germs, then cells, then atoms, and let the flyspeck of it distract you from the fact it’s someone else’s bone making itself home into your skin, a tic-tac-toe played on your calves between the knees of a man going home and a woman clocking out of work, as they leave your legs in carnation X's and O's, all red wilting blotches, and one of their shoulders fits like a tetris piece between two chunks of your spine to stroke it periwinkle, a small blue sorry excuse for a bruise.
The song playing in your ears loops again. It’s the only thing you've been listening to for the last week and you don't think you can tell when it begins and when it ends anymore, and it's possible you can hear it even when your earphones are off. (They’re on, right now. You know it so because you can feel the ache of them against the jelly bone of your ears’ shell. Or maybe the ghost of a feeling has fooled you once and shamed on you.)
It's finals season and you feel like you're wasting every minute you're not staring at the flow chart on the bottom of your backpack. Something about cells, and one of them having a heart while the other one doesn’t. (This is your first year of university. You can’t be fifteen. Maybe you just feel like you are. Fooled you twice, shame on you.)
You're eighteen, and you’ve lived with yourself long enough to know you can't stop thinking, but why can't it ever be something good? Like remembering the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells without needing to look at a flow chart (which is the one with the heart?), or like figuring out what's the opposite of motion sickness—this nausea you feel from being too still in an unmoving bus (if i give it a name, does it mean it wins?).
You’re eighteen and you can’t help breaking touch into germs and atoms—like you’ll either get sick from it or survive it long enough to study it under a microscope—and you call cells’ nucleuses hearts—as if the real term for them is something to guard your naivety from, a word too crude for a girl made of carnations and periwinkles, no thorns and eggshell frail.
You’re eighteen. How about you baptize yourself, elbow your way out of the crowd and drive the bus for once?
