yesnothankyou

I think about the sunrises I’ve collected in places where something was sundered incompletely,

(Parking lots, roof tops, passenger windows, childhood bedrooms thick with gloom and daydreams and fits of crushing honesty, quiet blue driveways lined with azaleas—every flower gilded and electric in slow blooms of light, viciously magenta. I used to wake up before most of my friends and haunt their yards while they slept warm and certain.)

All my small confessions, languid in my wait for sure joy. You were there for so many of them. Couldn't write you out even if I wanted to. You show up and I feel homesick but not quite, collapsed back into a person I had to grow out of. My heart halves, gives way, softens in smooth practiced motions. I still remember. I hung everything I could unto our temperamental moon.

(Once all I saw were moons. Felt good to be a thief of light. The smell of magnolia, the sound the wind makes when it eddies threw a chain link fence, a shower of horns crying from the street. Time turned it all into either something too halcyon or just terror. The colors aren’t even true anymore, did you notice? I don’t know when that happened.)

We found each other again when we both became mothers. and isn’t that so strange? You talk to me now like a decade never gathered between us and I look back with so much forgiveness because how could I not? Remember the driveways, remember the azaleas? Did you know that the color magenta doesn't have a wavelength? It doesn't exist on the visible spectrum. It's an interpretation, a composition; it bridges a gap. It's what happens when we try to wrap the channels of light from both ends.

(Squinting at skyscapes above us, all these cyclic beginnings and endings, cool and dark pools fractured in porchlight, school bells, notes in milky pastels, gestures confused with different kinds of devotion. Waking up in too warm dens after parties we’d only ever go to together and always covered in someone else’s glitter, feeling almost pretty inside bedrooms that weren’t ours, sleeping until late afternoon, sun sticky. We break curfew and you break my heart, smashed glass, I forgive you and forgive you, toss and turn in each others shadows. When I saw you out on the mezzanine right before the last time.)

You were the first person I ever felt safe with, I think. Weekends and summers swallowing up our dreams in your old twin bed where we laid around, talked shit, did nothing, never became anything. I was addicted to the feeling, a perfect prism to dissolve into. But what I was trying to fuse myself with was untenable. I knew, I just didn’t know what to do with it. It meant our friendship was predicated on obscuring a frenzied attachment that wasn't even about the people we really were anymore. I was horrified you ever knew the true scope of it, how all along I accidentally loved you so imprecisely. The focus was spangled with sincerity, it just wasn’t the right kind. I had to abandon it finally. I’ve tried to talk about this and about my girlhood so many times and I just can’t get close enough to the heart beat, I guess. I try and carve my way through but the truth is fractal, an empty house echo. What really happened and what it felt like are almost never two perfectly congruent things.

(Splitting sodas paid in pocket change, carbonation buzzing against our tongues. Broke and hungry but the hunger used to feel good, didn’t it? We don't want to go home yet, we never do. The neighborhoods before us are liminal and sprawling. Everything hollows and contours, everything sleeping castles or crumbling mansions. There's this ambient sense of something ancient and hoarded. Another thing sundered. The darkness rolls out like blown curtains and we’re still under the impression that anything could happen here, make us better in the morning, make us different. We wanted to be made different.)

I was afraid to tell you what you wanted to know—how the years happened so well, how it was surprisingly easy to let it all go like a morning unfolding. When I finally walked away I unwove the narrative into something that could finally stretch comfortably. Remember when we talked about how being smaller made us feel safe when it was maybe one of the most dangerous things we could be? Now I know where you were all those years and the truth is sadder and scarier than what any of us thought we knew. I can't even talk about it because it isn't mine to tell. There are so many parts of this that were never mine to tell.

(Walking silently beneath flood lights into a forest clearing: foxgloves in fading jade light, an altered world. I knew that I was only seeing what I wanted to see but I just couldn’t pull myself away, I hadn’t learn how yet.)

I think there are some histories we collect that only feel better if we imagine them slightly differently, but what's even being saved? We both know I never really knew you the way you knew me. That’s okay. Or at least I want it to be okay. I’m trying not to reconfigure the truth anymore. I’m trying to learn how to flinch. I’m twisting my insides into new hymns. And nobody knows anything about me that I didn’t want them to know once.