CLOSINGS AND POSTSCRIPTS FROM THE SMALL AND STRONG AND SIMPLE

Winter here feels long and seems bleak, but it’ll end, and we’ll have more sunlight at night, and you’ll be back with us. See you very soon.

I write sloppily and my feet are cold. All I can think about is what I should eat next, and if by the end of this year, I’ll be someone else. I want to be someone else, but also still a refined image of myself. I want to change and become colorful, but also be true to whatever my current cocoon holds. Every day I just have to wait and create my own growth. It’s terribly slow, and terribly cold outside. I can cover up but I don't want to. The extra hour of sunlight in spring is for my skin. The extra hours of darkness in winter is also for my skin, a slap and a warning in the shape of wind and gusts and ice.

Your friends love you. Do not forget this. I will be here to remind you.

I don’t really know what I want from everyone. I want honesty, and to feel their skin on mine, and to sleep on their carpeted floors, and then when we all wake up after noon, we brush our teeth together. We leave our hair falling over our shoulders, with waves and fringes spilling over our scalps like brushstrokes, in styles that we’ve never seen each other wear before. Our shirts are wrinkled, and we clink our morning beverages together over a cluster of miscellaneous pantry items. Leaving is hard and the drive afterwards is lonely. I want to be in the hallway in just our socks and cotton pants and lack of inhibitions and we just breathe each other's histories over the low hum of the movies through the walls downstairs. The silence with company always sounds like something and this time I think I heard your smiles and your relief. I think I even heard you two relax your jaws, loud like how my joints crack. Loud like a sigh.

Leave the meat out in water and use something heavy to weigh it down. And help yourself to the lemon grass in the freezer; that should be boiled too. Come home safely.

In five years, I will think of her differently. We, as a unit, will be different altogether, and I’m not currently sure if it’s for the best. What used to be Saturday mornings of lullabies and dishes and running water manifested into silence, shuffling, and the need to track when the garage door opens, and who’s opening it. Who goes through the two doors, up the two stairways, and by the impact of their feet on the landing, how will the day feel then? Do I escape, or does she escape? Do I eat cold food quietly in my room and listen to her movies from the opposite end of the house? Does she sleep to forget my name in her black and white, soundless dreams? The microwave is so close to her chair. I’m afraid of being too close.

I accepted the job offer! Isn’t it exciting? Another city, to begin anew. To the next stage.

During dress rehearsals, I would fear coming onto the floor late. Everyone seems to already be in the spotlight, and someone in the audience already has an actor or actress picked out. They hold show programs and bouquets and fundraiser cookies. I know my fellow cast members are off to bigger theaters and transatlantic voyages to palatial schools. Campuses full of castles where they’re crowned and I have to kneel. And what fun we all have had here in the same stage, with the same colors in our brace wires, and thin clothes from the same stores. I know goodbyes like I know my father; I know that he will always be with me, but sometimes, he makes me uncomfortable, upset with myself, or confused. But I want him here, and love him, and it takes so long to drink in the disappointment. The doubt and the criticism. Saying goodbye should feel like saying goodbye, but to me it is our eulogy.

P.S. - Let’s make something for the man across the street (the old man, I don’t know what he’s called). His back is so hunched, he looks like he’s sleeping when he mows the lawn.

I am a world record holder for memory. I'm so good at remembering sometimes that I need to pretend to forget, so no one will feel uncomfortable. Sometimes that includes me. However, I genuinely don’t remember much from when our house, with three bedrooms, was filled with twelve occupants. I don’t remember the code to my first high school locker. I also don’t remember sometimes that everything is fine and that I deserve love. But I know a lot of names; I have a roster from my entire life. The first boy who had ever made me laugh is in Tennessee, making something out of himself. The worst girl to ever grace my primary school life is drinking across the border in party dresses and high heels. The coworker who had given me my first set of paperwork still works with me and passes me in the office, but doesn’t know my name. How do we walk side by side for hours, exchanging small talk and laughter and workplace secrets, for you to feel the breeze of my body passing, and only think that I have a shadow and nothing else? How do we steal from and break each other for years only for us to cease fire without a treatise? How do we laugh over the illustrations of children’s books for weeks, and suddenly, we both disappear and now we’re isolated entities? We shared so much and at the end of the day I don't know if maybe I took more than you and put it in my backpack by mistake. I have all of you and you have none of me.

P.S. - It’s a plus one. Bring someone if you’d like, we’d love to have them!

Your head leaned onto my shoulder quite heavily, and in the moment, you glowed with bluish moonlight filtering through my opened trunk door. I had wished you would stop standing up so fast, and I still do, for you see stars way too often without looking up at the sky. From time to time, I think that no one else can brush up against me the way you do. I don’t necessarily want it to be identical to your touch. I don’t want their drawl and their breath on my lips like yours; they should be different. I, next to the bed with you, should be a different person too. I’m glad I still laugh about our first dinner at my house. I don’t know Morse code, but stepping on your foot under the table seemed to provide enough semantics for the night. We have so much food left, and we’re using our hands for the chicken and sticky rice. I don’t step hard enough to distract you from the meal, though. It would be rude of me to lead you astray when you have aims, when you have tasks, and when you have wants. I know you don't want to eat some of the things I'm feeding you but you take the bowl from my hands and together we spoon from it in anticipation. Your face swells with multiple emotions and I don't look at all of them more than I just bury my head in the crook of your neck and feel you chew. No one else has to watch either.

P.S. - Please feel free to contact us again and give the process another chance. It was a pleasure hearing from you.

Fourth place forever is like winning, in its own way. I like failure when I know I need, want, and will meet it. It’s at the apartment door and I know I’ll cry tonight, and tomorrow I’ll still be swollen and grey and foggy from the congestion. But it’s like a friend, and it reminds me constantly that things don’t really end until I’m dead, or until I really say goodbye. Not say goodbye but still have tension, and not say goodbye but still see them behind everyone’s backs. And I really don't hate losing, I hate the fact that this isn't fun. I hate the fact that your encouragement is born from pity. My friends love me like they pity me. I want to fail laughing, like a fall. I want to catch myself making mistakes authentically and immerse myself in the memory that it is to become. It is so easy and nice to be embarrassed sometimes but to feel it incessantly, soaked in it like I'm a clump of steeped tea leaves, allows for shame to enter my pores. It gets under my skin. I own the title of fourth place, runner-up, good sport; sometimes it goes as far as being sore in the way that winning is the source of others intentionally losing. I don’t want to win this way. You're only telling me that you're proud because I want to hear it, aren't you? But don't stop because I don't believe in the quality of my trophies. It's still a trophy in my hands.

P.S. - We love you, kid.

How old am I, really? She still thinks I like pink and holds a grudge from when I removed earrings I no longer saw fit my needs. I got my ears pierced when I barely could babble; how did I express jealousy and idolatry, and how did it turn into years of me being exactly like her? But also vowing to never be like her, because I have a body that doesn’t agree with imitation. Skin blooms dark in some places, and bruises pop up on my shins like they’re revealed secrets. Markings on my skin flower in such ways that post-mortem, they would know it's my leg. They would know it's my hand with the pencil mark under my knuckle. I can remember the year I was born, but not the current year, nor the distance between becoming something and still trying to become something. I have the same goal as I did during the time of my delivery. I have the same habits too, like crying and not understanding and being easily upset. I know it disappoints the old man. I know it paints me as a child and renders my friends confused and makes my relatives laugh at me. But all in all, I am joyous and giddy when I see progress, like a growing kid with a tape measure and a colored pencil and a wall. I still like stuffed animals and ice cream and breaking curfew, but I like quiet and crosswords and working the graveyard shift. I also like being loved and loving, and hope I still know how as a child does. Pure, unadulterated, palpable, and a bit humiliating. I am missing teeth and still smiling with my mouth open. When I laugh uncontrollably, I sound like an animal. I will try to not hold back when I feel what I feel, and if I feel love, I will say that I feel love for you and them and everyone and maybe, just maybe, the golden rule applies and I receive love too.