All the people
Lamenting the coming and going of everyone I've ever known
If Nothing’s Real; Piers Faccini
It Is Cyclical, Missing You; Lily Talmers
Today I write to you from the humble concrete steps of the Christian Science Center courtyard. A tender breeze graces the air and my knees, crisp from the ebbs of summer left in the sky. It’s currently cloudless, but I know there’s a storm passing through. My throat is hoarse and there’s a wayward piece of string dancing against the ridge of my tongue but my arms are the perfect temperature and I have finally donned a favorite item of mine: green cable knit sweater.
Flashes of red pass beneath my eyelids on the courtyard and between them are glimpses of a man I used to know, and then a girl.
Outside the Steriti Memorial Rink in the North End of Boston, my socks are soaked. I’m dancing on the balls of my feet and the equally wet seams of my blue jeans singe the skin of my ankles relentlessly. In my minds eye, I look the worst I ever have. In my own eyes, I’m hypnotized by a mustache; and a blue hand with neatly clipped nails in a fist around a useless umbrella. I’m restless, the thread in my mouth—ever the ballerina— is wound tight in my throat but I speak nonetheless. I ask for an impression, my eye line is drawn up and then shot—as if with a fucking bazooka— back down. I’m mostly nervous, berating myself with the same question I always have,
Do I want this?
At the time no, yes. No. Absolutely.
He performs, flawlessly, an Owen Wilson. This version of which appears nightly in my dreams. He waits a beat, and then two, then a third. Within which I have been reduced to the likes of the rain pummeling the ground. Then I cast my glance upwards one more time and I am met with a kiss.
I am immediately humiliated, mortified, elated, lost.
Weeks pass, with my Wednesday’s spent watching movies, and laughing, and awkwardly maneuvering around my presence in his bedroom. And then I go home. At first in his car. At first fretting with the door handle of his 2002 black Honda Civic; awaiting a kiss to seal the night within me. It comes and it doesn’t, I never know. Shortly thereafter I return in the backs of cars, now with my headphones on.
Angelina; Pinegrove
This burns at my ears, I try endlessly to decipher our roles in each others lives. Then I never see him again, and my chest aches at the loss. I leave him with an unpaid debt—only on my end.
In the summer before a goodbye text from Thailand—one which in retrospect, never actually came—I charred the skin of my neck in a hot car against a hotter seatbelt. The car broke down, so did I. Then in the grass a foot away, my thighs hiccuped against a swarm of thoroughly fattened mosquitos. Four nights a week, only for two weeks… maybe three, would I drive myself there on bitter, bristling roads that would just barely miss the deadline to swallow me whole.
In the grass next to the car alongside the fireflies and the mosquitos, and the alkaline tears embracing my cheeks, a single tattoo on a pallid forearm curls against my chest. It’s dark, with wide and jagged brush strokes. Then two short legs, clad in pilled, black sweats circle me. Another hand moves straying hair from my face then pushes my spine to its warm chest. A sharp chin comes to meet the place my shoulder and neck collide. I am rocked forward and back as I cry, and as if in confessional, I scrub myself clean with admission. Finally I am swallowed so whole that conjuring an image of escape stirs pain in my breath. The mechanics are all wrong. It feels good though. It feels like being realized. An overdue actualization that bounces and flashes between our eyes. Love is conceded and it dances slowly, sinfully between us.
Friends come. The car engine is jumped. My heart finally slows but he is still there: somehow solemn and somehow laughing. A year later, he has come and gone and come again, he is still the kindest boy I’ve ever met.
I spin a stuttered pavane alongside all my memories of all my favorite people. One that I may perform until my dying breathe because I’m not sure anyone has ever departed from me without a piece of me. My hand always begins heavy and unhappy. Burdened with a sense of newness, and a concern for previous emotional possessions. As the weight distends, so do I, world-weary as ever. But it quickly disperses after that, and I am left aching and floundering.
Drinking Age; Cameron Winter
Thank you for reading:)