her

I don’t think of myself as tempted by the vices, but every once in a while I meet someone who strikes a certain envy in my heart, and I think to myself, this sin was made for me.

△△△

I met her before I really met her. We were ten maybe, scraping knees on the asphalt as though the bloody cuts were battle scars and the scabs we peeled were trophies, nothing but glory. We took turns pushing each other on the tire swing. We dug our soles, our literal souls into the woodchips until the playground whispered our names after dark. We were ten and, really, we were just kids with no idea that the world would leap into the future, free-falling, free-falling.

All I saw was the girl who wore holes into the heels of her shoes because she ran around like one of the boys. That wasn’t the girl I envied, though.

△△△

When I really met her, I didn’t know who I’d met.

An unfinished research paper sat in my desktop folder, spiting me into the softer hours of the morning. But 4am has a clever duality that lures both the thinkers and the procrastinators.

I didn’t want to think about the Jazz Age and the rise of the middle class and the urbanized cesspool we call the Roaring Twenties. That night I wanted to be burdened by the woes of humanity. I wanted to hear the earth groan beneath the weight of the world—I wanted to share it.

I found myself where I usually did when the sun had not yet woken but the moon had not yet slept—entrenched between punctuation, buried within metaphor. I like to think that I found her there, too, trailing careful fingers over a riverbed of words. They sink to the bottom like stones. Curious little things that carry much more than the casual observer could ever know. There are, as there always are, the occasional souls who wander too far into the water, and they are the ones who reach to its depths and learn what lies beneath.

Tonight, I stare at my reflection but a pebble skips into where my chin should have been. The ripples spread into my features. First it disrupts the cheekbones then displaces the nose and shatters the brows and finally pushes the collarbones into nothingness.

I don’t say anything at first and she doesn’t either. But then she tosses another stone at my likeness, and this time when I hold it, smooth and flat and the color of dreams unborn, I learn the last time it left the lips of lovers. I fall in love with the curve of its letters and commit it to memory.

She tells me to look at my reflection so I do.

And then all I see are the stars where my lips should have been and I am struck by a cosmic wholeness and the thought that I am not a riverbed child but that we are riverbed children.

I look back to her but her gaze is fixed in the clouds where the stars really are.

△△△

But these are untruths and I am just a writer who fancies the imaginary. In reality, I stumbled upon an anonymous tumblr when it was far too late and I too tired but still her words struck me where I didn’t know I wanted to be struck. They resonated with me. I unraveled in her prose, and I didn’t even know her name.

I felt in love but also hopelessly jealous.

My greatest fear is drowning.

△△△

When I found her or maybe when she found me, I learned that reality was unkind and I wondered what kind of world could break down a person but build up her words.

I arrive at a party I don’t remember getting invited to. But these city lights keep us up, and this is how we lay waste to weekend after weekend, Friday nights—black-out drunk on wasted ambition and other crimes. Saturday mornings—lost to a slumber much sweeter than consciousness. Sunday evenings—at a very, very particular time after 8pm when the thought of Monday becomes very, very real and regret is what we find laced in our veins.

When the energy fades into a comfortable buzz of 2am, I stumble upon a sight I can only describe as extraordinarily peculiar. In the loft bedroom, a girl from my childhood reads to whomever would listen. (Free-falling, free-falling.)

Her phone trembles between bruised fingers. Partygoers sit like schoolchildren before naptime, quiet with no promise of remembering this very moment. I stand at the doorframe, listening.

  I catalog significant life events and mistakes
  according to the Dewey Decimal System.
  We fall into
    095 Books notable for bindings
    157 Emotions (no longer used)
    188 Stoic philosophy
    399 Customs of war and diplomacy
    708 Galleries, museums, private collections

This sparks something in my memory, and I imagine her writing this, lying awake on a Tuesday night turned Wednesday morning. She’d write and rewrite the stanzas, humming the verses until they become just right.

  538 Magnetism
    I use polysyllabic words when drunk.
    The longer the word, the more I think I’m flirting.
    165 Fallacies and sources of error
    In a month you’ll forget me.
    (I said that a month ago.)
    I’ll believe this every month forever
    because it’s hard to forget being forgotten
    and you never want to be surprised by it.

I think to rippled reflections. I think to the night that didn’t exist, the stars buried in her eyes, her voice, her entire being. I think that I fell in love with more than just her words.

  419 Verbal languages not spoken or written
    Whenever I’m on a lake,
    I imagine the waves bring me a corpse:
    always of a young woman,
    beautifully preserved—
    not love letters in bottles
    or treasure maps or starfishes.
    She summons an armada of bodies,
    all awaiting discovery—
    the gentle lapping of the water
    like a child tugging at his mother’s blouse,
        I’m here, I’m here.

  & 748 Glass

I finish her poem alongside her—“My greatest fear is drowning.”

She looks up at me, and she smiles with those stars we saw that night.

I haven’t written anything great for a while. Hope this was okay. Featured image by Andrew Wilson. Poem by Heather Sommer.