bodies
a chapter book of fleeting moments collects dust on my memory shelf. at one point in my life, you and i were the main characters in it.
i’m still thinking about that summer where our nights vanished into mornings, and we kept all of our secrets trapped underneath a street light on the corner at the end of our street. we lived on borrowed time. and while we always knew we had a finite amount of it, my god were we going to milk it for all it was worth.
we collected bodies like trading cards, stacking them up on our beds night after night. i think we were both hungry for a sense of place in this world that we had never gotten from anything or anyone before. we carried a constant feeling of inadequacy that nothing could remedy. we were desperate to be seen as worthy, as beautiful, as lovable. i know we saw each other as those things, but we didn’t count. we were lip-lock lovers, pinky-promise best friends with a penchant for ripping life, and ourselves, apart and into a thousand little puzzle pieces, pieces that we promised we would put together one day. maybe.
remember some of the people we loved for a few hours? do you wonder where they are now? did they move away, or are they still trapped in our hometown, clinging onto the same memories that i’m clinging to (but in a different city)? will we always cling to the past, not because it was particularly amazing, but because of how addictive nostalgia can be? do you cling to the past, or am i the only one who’s still stuck in arrested development?
it hits me at different moments throughout the days, throughout the weeks, throughout the months, throughout the years. you know the feeling; i’ll be in the middle of a conversation and suddenly, i’ll wish it was you there in their place. and you could literally be talking me through advanced physics or advanced trigonometry, and i would find that far more riveting than anything anyone else could ever tell me. i want to fill up my head with your voice and drown in your words, but only as much as you’d let me.
you were milky orange tank tops that clung to our shoulders and ribcages; you were fireflies trapped in our hands, but never for far too long; you were warm summer rain falling down our fresh faces as we stood in the middle of the street and had a silent dance party; you were cool summertime wind that wrapped around my bare ankles; you were echoing laughter in a half-empty theater on a Saturday night; you were four a.m. skips down supermarket aisles, trying to figure out what ice cream flavor to eat so we could forget about the boys who called us bitches; you were my burgeoning adolescence coming to life and in doing so, you left me breathless and full of wonder; you were those shy and awkward moments before a first kiss. you were my first kiss. i lied to every boy, telling them that they were my first kiss when it was really you.
our twisted tongues on a bed made sense of our youthful confusion. we spread our arms out wide like angel wings lest a single touch turned sinful. we were heavenly bodies bound to this earth, constantly forgetting where we came from. you carried a garden on your face and each time the sun kissed it, a rosebud would spring into full bloom on each of your cheeks. and once in a pink moon, you’d get nervous and bite down onto your cherry-drop lips, and i would lean in for a taste when no one was looking. i was selfish because i wanted all your love and affection for myself.
but driving on empty highways at two a.m. had a way of reminding us of our fleetingness as well as of our invincibility. some nights, you’d edge the car faster, getting us as close to the speeding limit as possible without actually hitting it (or going a single digit over). you were calculated risk. we were reckless, but we never toyed with death. death existed in micro-moments all around us. we were narrowly trying to escape it, not drive into its jaws.
the summer wind would tease our broad shoulders, our hair would spiral in the breeze behind us, and we would scream anything that we could think of into the cosmos. our words would float up to the dark blue-black nothingness, asking to be trapped there forever. the sky was littered with stars that we took for granted. the moon looked at us with piqued curiosity. i wish for every night of mine to be like the ones we had on the highways. i haven’t stopped chasing that feeling ever since.
i’ve learned something with age and it is that i am a fool. i took for granted the brilliance of youth, the wild abandon it gave me, and how falling wasn’t actually as scary as i thought it would be, not when i had a safety net. i was always afraid of stepping outside of myself, but you had a way of calming down those fears, quelling their rapturous sounds into comforting silences.
we used to tape a list of grievances to the bottom of our skateboards so we could trample them on every handlebar we could find because we didn’t want any reminders of our impending adulthood to stick with us.
well, it’s here now.
- n.d.