Poetry

Interlude

It always ends before it begins or so it seems. I skirt the edges of summer’s potential in search of higher ground while the girls plunge beneath the surface. They swim through sunny afternoons, slick limbs and sweaty palms sticking to the belly of the month. I spend twenty-seven days begging June to love me and three facing the wall. It scrunches me up in its fist and throws long over the head of July. There is always at least one part of this body that aches, at least one side of this heart sucking in so that it fits; recently, I have been spilling over. Bloody and ugly and desperate; you are still scrubbing your side of the street, and I am still sorry for the mess. That’s the thing about summer. It shines a light through the cracks in the curb until you crawl out of them — I am no longer someone else’s to clean up. I press my mouth to the lip of the year and tilt my head back; there is nothing left to do but swallow the days down in thick, oval gulps in search of a dawn to slip into. Perhaps by August, I will have found a new way to sit in the middle of things, incomplete and jagged, without ripping holes and falling through them.

clb

California girls!

August is bleached and freckled, flung over the front porch railing on Evert’s Street. Liv cracks four eggs into a pan and the birthday cards are on the bar cart. We have big and important things to tell each other now that we have grown into our mouths, and our minds, and our meaning; I tell her I am better because I want to be. We cycle through the neighbourhood past dark. She lends me a light for the back of my bike and yells every few minutes so she knows I am still behind her. We have spent the last five years a little like this; taking turns up front, always finding our way back home. Down by the bay, we are drunk on laughter and the hurt dilutes in the water. Somehow, we are eighteen and twenty-one and twenty-four. Even when the seasons trade themselves in and the years pull us in different directions, we will always be girls wringing moments from the months so we have something to point at — look! Look at the lives we have lived and the Augusts we have left ourselves in — we were here!

We were here.

We were here

clb

notes on girlhood

i slip into november because i have nowhere else to go. winter meets me there and looks around for a while until i introduce myself. i have dug my soft, pink heels into the bones of childhood and i have nothing left to stand on. i wanted to be something you could get your teeth into; i wanted to be raw enough. girlhood knows nothing about enough, so i embody too much and become an open wound.

i wanted so badly to be a woman until i stopped being a girl. woman is the wide, open mouth that swallows girlhood whole; i am still hungry. she chews at the inside of my stomach, i call it aching. she pushes her dreams into the parts of my body i hate the most so that i will notice her. i think she would eat my eggs one by one if it meant she could be reborn.

it is halfway through november now and i am already rehearsing how to tell it i am leaving; girlhood knows nothing about the middle. i chew around the outside of everything and one day, i will be lying inside of a human heart, lying on a bed, lying to the world that i am finally full.

when i climb through december’s bedroom window, it does not turn around. the cold is harsh but girlhood is harsher. she carves her name into the belly of the month; it has been acting distant. mean. different. she knows what this means. when it is someone else’s turn to leave, girlhood finds the middle and cries. she finds the middle and polishes it. she finds the middle is the open wound. the year closes out on her like a father moving out. she stays in her room. she has nowhere else to go.

clb

When January starts to feel like a dull ache behind the eyes, I call my brother. Small talk is big talk when the voice is the sound of a safe heart and a childhood room. I’m here. Not literally. You know what I mean. He keeps getting taller but we still wave goodbye from the front door until he turns the corner. When are you next home? Soon. Ok.

When we run out of things to say, we turn on the TV. Sometimes, I think I do not know him at all. He is no longer the boy who lives on the other side of the wall, nodding across the canteen in careful comradery. At home, we hung out, draped across the sofa while evenings ran on ahead, stretching time until it snapped and sent us barreling towards bedtime. TV on. Same jokes make us laugh, eyes squeezed shut. Funny. How I thought I didn’t know him at all.

Twenty-nine approaches. We will never be ten and seven again. Wrapped up in space blankets and eating dry cereal out of porcelain bowls with our tiny hands. Nostalgia is a needle splitting skin, right above the heart centre. You go first, I’ll follow. Along the dark hallway, down the stairs, out into the world. You’re annoying. Just kidding. Only sometimes. I’d take a bullet for you. No you wouldn’t. Yes. I would. Really? Yes. Ok. Chill out.

clb

big brother!