I Felt A Twinge At First In My Stomach, Like I’d Eaten Bad Crab, Only Worse. Like I’d Eaten Two Bad

I wished every day was summer when I was a little girl. No school time, just bikes on the pavement. Sun chasing our shadows, never quite able to keep up. Sweat collected on my forehead like a tribe of parents watching me worried as I popped wheelies with no helmet on. The wind brushed my hair wild. I wished every day was summer when I was a little girl. But I’m a woman now, and the sun has caught up to me in the shape of fluorescent bulbs. It has taken my shadow. I swivel in my office chair and lean back to feel childhood’s wind-

I feel nothing.

The girl I was and the woman I am reconcile in tides. Coursing warm waves and biting cold foam, dancing in circles. Becoming one another, and abandoning one’s self in permanence.

I’ve whittled myself down,

Suckled myself to nothing like a cough drop in a cheek,

And all I have to show for this betrayal, is a familiar flavor in my mouth to mull over as the adults speak.

A letter to my father,

I behave youthfully around you, happy go lucky and thoughtless at times. This isn’t because I am those things, but because you let me be. You have never been a parent to me, but a friend. And as your friend, I must tell you:

I behave as if there is nothing the matter, to keep the peace, and not ruin what bond we have, but I have been lying to you, and to myself, that our differing politics needn’t ever intersect. In fact, they intersect every time I look at you and remember the hat you hang in your garage. The red one, with the white letters. I remember you voted against my interests for your own, which foolishly you did, as you will not get your way in the end.

And seeing as I cannot have my father and honesty at once, it seems neither will I.

I’m like a child, the way my mind works. I want us to look at each other, but I keep covering my eyes.

Sirens often eat out of hatred, not love. So when the sailor girl asked the siren if she found her appetizing, she shook her head with a tight lipped grin. The human took it as rejection, her eyes falling to her hands and picking at the callouses she found unsightly, not understanding she had just shown her affection for her. That hiding one’s teeth was a gentle act of favor the merfolk used.

I reel back from the sunlight every time it caresses my cold skin, cooing in vein for me to love it back. Nothing can bring me to it. I have been burned before. I have been honest and I have been present and I have walked in the damnation of the daylight and I will not make that mistake again.

I will make it again. I will make it again. If only to see the sky, I will make the awful trek from hidden to known, again.

I adored living as a shell of myself. I held echoes in my chest where my heart used to be, and laughed in tickles as the words of others caroused my rib bones. Nothing at all was serious, nothing mattered the littlest bit to me. Until someone I knew recognized me. A girl I went to elementary school with, with sharp blue eyes and now dyed brown hair; she used to be blonde. I used to be too. Everything feather heavy caught weight on me, my skin was saddlebags, my heart beat for the first time in eight long years. It was a rapid hurried thing my heartbeat, like it had just woken up from a bad dream. The girl, well, a woman now, ogled at me with a sort of cold consternation—she looked sorry for me. My hair sort of tangled, my outfit worn since last night must’ve been so starkly different from the neat hand-raised-in-the-air-eager-to-answer-a-question girl that used to sit next to her in Mrs. Jones class. It hit me then that something did still matter to me, not present me, but to my childhood self. Little me was still alive, she still cared about what Jasmine thought of us. She used to cheat off of our math quizzes for god’s sake and she’s sorry for me? How could I ever be something I’m not in peace when there are lingering living memories trooping about, forcing me to remember who I was, and acknowledge what I’ve become. I adored living as a shell of myself. Nothing hurt so badly as it does now that I don’t anymore.

My innocence was taken by hands no bigger than my own, another child who’s eyes swam blue with cold apathy. She couldn’t have known what she was doing was wrong, for I recognize now, the same things were being done to her. How can I raise my fists to the one who hurt me when she had no innocence to begin with, and I had something to lose. She was damned from the start.

There is an understanding in burning high rises that only it’s occupants can gather—that the rapid footsteps and baited breath do little for longevity if the staircase is ash and the elevator an oven.

No, the hurried panic is not for survival of the body, but a hunt for another. A body heat almost indiscernible undulating between the flap like flames—like pop ups out of a picture book. You may think it madness to seek heat in a fire, but this is a heat of the soul, a desire to die in embrace. To know a heart beat’s breath against your own.

An understanding that if life must be unkind, you must never let it be alone.