coming of age

i.

growing up is like losing a game of catch with your body: sinews slipping from their sockets like rain from the rooftops, epidermis crackling softly like glacier ice as it melts. at high tide, the larynx sinks in ambivalence as you realize your skin is not yours anymore.

i am nothing but wrists and elbows hung out to dry. wrinkled silk clothespinned on the galaxies, smoldering ashes without the memory of a fire to burn for. the void between black and white leaves a world painted in gray; where light becomes the absence of shadows. where light becomes absence.

ii.

tarmac sears the rubber of your tennis shoes as rusted cars honk their salutes. momentum feels numb on your legs as the throng of sweating bodies shuffles past afternoon sun, eager for a breeze that is more of your neighbor’s breathless gasps than august gusts. schoolkids kick dried grass into the air and don’t stop to watch it fall to the ground again. the fear of never being able to touch the clouds pushes you ahead of the rest, and the call of the timer barely registers until you turn around and realize there is no one behind you.

the ocean is loud. louder than all the cities you can name on your fingers. nature watches as you rediscover the sounds humans built on top of: waves crashing into foam as they reach sand, rocks disappearing under the tides to return as glass softer than the palm of a hand, pebbles swimming as the water reaches to take them home. the sunset is singing its last breaths, and for the first time, you feel like you can live. rosy fingers tuck the last pieces of dawn in your pocket, and you leave with footsteps in the sand.

you don’t turn around to notice the shadow on the horizon has your name.

iii.

we are getting ready for the dance and i pretend i do not know how ethereal you look with string lights in your hair. you brush feathers onto my cheekbones and the girl sitting in front of the vanity has the same smile as my mother.

before i know it, the wand is in my hands and we are performing a magic trick: making ugly beautiful. but there is nothing to change in your daisy face, with the rainforest eyes that make me want to sing the notes to a song i don’t know. hair like burnished amber has already burnt itself into the back of my mind. you say you want to be special, just for tonight. and so i sweep your eyes with maple eyeshadow until the day we are in full bloom.

iv.

we drank in the sun that cream-soda summer. wishing away the arguments upstairs with a dime in the jukebox. one of us stayed behind when those boys walked up to the table; cedar cologne and borrowed leather don’t mix well with milkshakes and fries. one of us told the other to call their parents while they hiked to the cabin. (hands like hot chocolate scald your body in all the wrong places. you lick them off, trembling, with burnt plastic straws.)

two of us jumped into that cream-soda summer. one of us swam out.

v.

i am fifteen and outgrowing all the words i learned to say. the keys to the camry are jingling in my hand. just yesterday we were graduating from eighth grade, carpooling in your mother’s suv. now we are in the driver’s seat, all too eager to make our way around a world that will not remember our names.

last october we pretended to be grown-up and sipped apple cider like champagne at homecoming. homecoming. what does that mean to two souls searching for a place they’ve never known? we are nothing but wrists and elbows, names etched in the shadow on the horizon. and yet we are giggling in maple eyeshadow, intoxicated with cream-soda summers that take and take and take.

but i will keep giving and giving and giving even if our parallel lines never meet. we will always be unconditional. and i dream of the cosmos shattering softly into stained glass, the chatter of reeds on a damp july night. just to stay by your side as we watch the world fall would be enough. it would be enough.