Applauding the Fool
You graduated in black like you were going to a funeral
and no one told you that you were - that this is it -
this is rebirth and you're all grown up.
There are bright things ahead of you
like bookkeeping
and remembering to shake the crumbs out of the toaster
every once in a while.
No one told you life would be so dull
or that beer only tastes good in front of boys.
You can already tell where you'll get wrinkles later on
the little crinkles in your forehead
and it's becoming blindingly clear that you aren't immortal
and that you aren't quite as clever
as you always thought you were.
Maybe God is more that just an idea
because He certainly wasn't yours
and reading the Bible before bed isn't doing what you thought it would.
The drunk girl in the mirror isn't you
but it was definitely you
out on the docks
who smoked that oversweet cigarette which made you feel ill.
Maybe happy is only something that exists in retrospect.
It's spring but there's no sun
and in fact the weather is fading the world like jeans
even the little yellow flowers are pallid and wilting.
Maybe it's you that's wilting.
You're only nineteen but maybe you've lost it already
and have nothing left to give.
Maybe you've already surrendered to banality
and it's swallowing you
up up up
because your life is running very crookedly
alongside the straight bright path
you pretended it would be.
Odalisque
There's a place to hang a hammock
on the hill above your house.
Here we are free
and know each other to be beautiful.
It pains me to see you grow
up up and away
to see you suck in your stomach
and sit up straight under their gaze
- the boys' -
because you love it when they look at you.
And that's okay.
But don't let their eyes give you your value.
You're worth so much more.
Like when you sillywalk down the hillside
or sing loudly out of tune or when your face twists
because your mouth isn't wide enough
to let all your laughter out.
I come second to you, but I don't mind.
I've always sought out lights brighter than mine
in the hopes of illuminating something larger that I.
And so that I can hide.
But I can see where you broke,
where your spine snapped
from twisting back to please others
and the holes they left
and how you're insecure about the way
the tops of your thighs rub together.
Or the way you tiptoe around your mother.
There's a place to hang a hammock
on the hill above your house.
It's quiet here
and I hope you can see
you deserve so much better
than what they're giving you.
And Our World Floats
It was raining ropes on the day they found Sandy’s body; great coils of water tumbled down from the heavens and spattered onto the cobbled streets, onto the roofs of the little Swiss chalets that were built to take on just such storms.
Separately, over the course of that day, we were told about it, but we did not speak to one another until several days later. There was hardly anything to say apart from the same consolatory words that were being lathered onto our shoulders with the hands of our respective families. Sunday, finally, just three of us gathered on the docks for no reason other than to get away from the concerned and pitying gazes that I, at least, did not feel worthy of.
I sat on the edge of the pier and stared down at my oddly long toes, distorted by the ripples of water that covered them. It was a beautiful afternoon, the soft grey clouds moving and shifting to let the gold and blue light leak through the cracks between them. No rain yet, though the sky was heavy with the potential of it, of the same kind of downpour that had marked Sandy’s death. Three days later and I was becoming okay with it, I told myself.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked, keeping my gaze fixed out on the lake and the blue shapes of the mountains which enclosed it, “Do you think it was one thing that set her off or was it an accumulation of little things?”
“She was weak,” a note of undisguised bitterness slid through Amanda’s teeth with the words. She was sitting cross-legged behind me, strands of hair the colour of tomato soup slipping through the strings of the guitar she was curled around.
“I don’t think she was,” Piper, lying next to me with her dreadlocks and her arms spread out over the docks, interjected, “I think she just felt things differently from us. Things affected her more strongly, like she didn’t have any mental defense mechanisms or something.”
“Yeah, weak,” Amanda repeated. She was fourteen years old, the youngest of us all, but had perhaps more right than any of us to be angry at Sandy.
On the edge of September, there was a whole summer behind us of which I possess a series of memories. Memories that all involve me standing in front of some speckled mirror, in some public bathroom - the kind that never has any soap and where the tap water is always cold. In these memories I am drunk and looking at myself and feeling as though the face peering back at me isn’t my own. A round and red-cheeked face, swallowed up by a pair of hazel eyes that always looked far too large and glassy to be mine. A face framed by blue curtains of hair that certainly didn’t belong to me. Surely I
was someone different; someone taller and brighter who didn’t look as though they were trying so hard to be original.
I imagined that Sandy was standing in front of a mirror when she took those pills. She was staring into the face of the person she was destroying and probably feeling as though it wasn’t hers, either. That would have made killing herself much easier. I imagined that she was dead long before they found her tiny, wasted body curled up under a pile of blankets in her bedroom. Maybe she’d been dead all summer.
She’d been alive at the start. Caspar met her first, mid-April when the leaves were just budding on the branches left bone-like from the icy winter, at the kind of rough party I usually avoided. The kind of party where people took their clothes off and indulged in drugs stronger than weed. She’d stumbled up to him, told him that she was in love with him and had wanted to know if he loved her back. He’d said no, but took her home with him anyways. He loved that kind of thing, strange girls telling you they were in love with you.
“She’s not even pretty,” he’d told me the next day, “You could fit a golf-ball in the gap between her teeth.”
“Think you’ll see her again?”
“Nah, I doubt it.”
I could tell that this probably wasn't true because of the way he kept shaking his head with a small, bewildered half-smile, as though he couldn't quite believe that this girl had ever really existed.
Piper’s voice pulled me back to the water and the cold wood of the docks beneath me.
"Have either of you talked to Cas?"
I glanced at Amanda, who shook her head.
"He's pretty much just kept to his room," she said, "I think he's listening to music and sleeping. I don't know what else he could be doing. He came out for dinner last night and ate an entire roast chicken by himself. I don't think he was surprised by it all, really."
"Were you?"
"Surprised? Yeah, I guess. You just don't imagine it, like. For someone to just stop being there," she paused before speaking again in a halting, hesitant voice, "But do you think it makes sense? That she went that way?"
We made yes noises. We agreed that she wasn't well. That she couldn't cope. That she wasn't going to make it to thirty anyways, the way she was treating herself. We said that we missed her, that we would keep missing her. We told ourselves some bullshit and we told ourselves some truth and all of it was far too intertwined to be made sense of.
It didn’t really matter what we said, in the end. It was nice to simply see each other and to remember that she’d been real and that maybe we were justified in missing her.
“Do you remember when we walked around the lake?”
“When she set Cas’ shoes on fire?”
The subject changed as the light began to slant and dim. A wind picked up and our thoughts returned to the present and to the future.
“I can’t believe I have to go to school tomorrow.”
“It’s getting cold out.”
And we returned to our respective homes and thought about Sandy some more, because even though she was gone, there was no getting away from her.
***
Sandy was two years older than Caspar and I and the others, on the verge of turning twenty when we first met her. She was taking a college course online, at home, under the watchful gaze of her quietly psychotic parents. At night she would sneak out of her window to run through fountains in her underwear and get up to all the other things good Christians dread that their teenagers get up to.
I don't know what I was expecting, when Cas first introduced us. The little I knew of her had conjured up a vaguely gargoyle-esque figure in my imagination. If I tried to imagine anything other than this, I could only pictured long-nailed female hands grasping at Cas’ shirt. But whatever my preconceptions, I was not prepared for the flesh-and-blood mess that was Sandra Weaver.
She had supposedly run away from home eight times. However, she told us, the first six barely counted. The furthest she’d gone on these ventures was to the local super market, where she would linger until closing time before eventually walking home, bored and hungry. The seventh time was when she was fourteen, and her family was living with her maternal grandparents and their three other children in Michigan. As she recounted these stories, we listened to them while holding them at arm's length, as we had learned to listen to everything she said.
“I just got bored,” she explained, shrugging her shoulders as though to throw off any of the negativity, the concern generally expressed towards children who run away, “The house was really crowded and the TV was broken and my mom was kind of pissing me off, so I literally just walked out of the house and took the next bus into the city. When I got to Detroit I mostly wandered around,
bought some ice cream. I slept under a bridge that night because I’d spent my only money on ice cream. The next day I met a guy who let me crash at his.”
We were sitting on the docks when she told us this, all of us, barefoot and bare-shouldered, drinking in the evening sun. Our eyes were all on Sandy, except for Cas’. He was staring out at the lake, apparently lost in thought, as though he were barely listening.
“So you just stayed with some random person?” Amanda asked skeptically. A menthol, the first cigarette she’d ever tasted, was balanced carefully between her first and second fingers, held with the same caution she used to smoke it.
Either oblivious or unfazed by the reservations and doubts she must have seen on our faces, Sandy’s head bobbed and her eyes widened as she replied, “Yeah, he was a doll, he was totally cool about it. Anyways, my parents found me pretty quick that time. I probably wanted to be found, I wasn’t exactly covering my tracks. We moved here only a month or so later. My theory is, they figured that if I ran away in Switzerland there would be less of a chance of my being murdered or, like, turning into a child hooker.”
The eighth time she ran away was because she fell in love. She was seventeen, on the train from Geneva to Bex; she met the tattooed boy on his way home from Swiss-Germany, where he had just finished his military service, and she went home with him. He didn't speak English, she didn't speak French, but the way she told it, they didn't need to speak. It wasn't so much running away, as simply not going home. She spent a week in his apartment, sleeping all day while he worked and wandering the streets at night, sometimes with him, sometimes alone. He kicked her out eventually.
Her parents weren't looking for her. They had told the school she was attending at the time that she wouldn't be coming back, and it was upon her return that they began homeschooling her. This final escapade marked Sandy's parents realization that they had no control over her. That they exerted no power whatsoever over this selfish girl who had no respect for them, and they reacted to this by cracking down hard, tightening their grip on her to a point she could barely stand. They kept her locked away, so she said, and she grew ill and thin in protest, but she behaved herself.
This was not a story she shared with the group, but one she'd told Cas near the start, and one he relayed to me before I'd even met her.
"They started letting her go out alone just after she started asking to go to church with them," Cas told me.
"Did she expect that to happen?"
"Of course she did," he paused for a moment and the corners of his lips turned up into a smile as he continued, "She told me God set her free."
