Solstice and Symbiosis

There is a girl, a deceased reptile coiled up in a museum jar on the shelves of my memory. I am not invincible, and I know she is listening. Place ear to belly and hear echolocation, litany of when the knife has dropped without an incision occurring. Grip on reality becomes slick. We lose our place in history. I will hold my hands out in surrender, let the sun read the lines on my palms, and sink into the inability to undo.

I see myself in fresh-cut grass, a yellow swim shirt, thumb over the water hose, and Katie shrieking during the summer she basically lived at my house. Lips were tinted by watermelon juice, and her freckles were almost as dark as my mother’s. My hair glowed, freshly cut and shorter than it had ever been, and I felt something like loss though I didn’t recognize her face quite yet. I can hear our laughter when I close my eyes, shimmering and stumbling. Squinting through the harsh light, plucking out bloody teeth, we were searching for something in the air; offering our bodies to serve as vessels for rare magic. There was a bargain made with the wind that June. We wanted to fly, exist somewhere with each other separate from where we were. We wanted to be swept off our feet. We wanted to become more, but instead, we became less.

Both of those girls are dead now. I don’t need to remind them how the story goes; they know it all too deep. In recent years I have gathered enough strength to dig them out of the soil and tuck them into a proper bed. We were only kids. We deserve that much. We are worthy of a bedtime story that doesn’t consist of memory, but we are trapped in our own subconscious, and like many children, we are hesitant to let go of all that we know. I think that this is possibly why I’ve watched the new High School Musical series three times even though I am twenty years old. They need something to keep them company other than their trauma.

Curiosity killed the cat, or so the saying goes. We knew more than we were. Sometimes I view it as an overdose. When you put a seed in a beaker and keep pouring a substance in, it will move, fight against the current. At first, this is what we wished for: pinky fingers intertwined and noses tucked into hair, waiting for the shift in the air. Katie wanted rollercoasters, fast and fearful. Replacement theory. I wanted words and internal architecture. Transference. Projection. The seed got jostled around, began to float, felt what it meant to be high. The glass wasn’t half empty or half full; it was overflowing. We felt and we kept feeling until we sensed the presence of each other’s brain inside of our own skull. Symbiosis. Phantom limb. We spent our days in an elevator counting the floors to calm down. Breath would hitch due to the altitude. I had never been fond of heights. Time operated differently. We felt that we were fifteen for three years and sixteen for only three months. I still live inside October. I’ve never truly left.

I think of how funeral parlors smell, how my favorite scent is Halloween. How it lives here too, rooted in the entanglement of intestines and sections of the aorta. The feeling rises like bile, through the hole in the roof of my mouth, into the brain. Escalates. I still am not fond of heights. There is a contamination of things I once held dear. Of things I still hold. My favorite photo of the two of us is from when we were about six. Your arm is gripping my side too tightly. After the picture was taken, you used all your strength to heft me off the ground, not afraid of being crushed by my weight when we fell. Looking back, I should have known it from the start.

I understand what it means to be dead when you dig a grave in your own backyard; when there is soil in your skin. There was a dead raccoon in the walls of my childhood home, and I associate the stench with all things that are on the verge of ending. In the last few days of autumn, I asked myself if, in a way, I was ending. I’m a strong believer in reincarnation, but I’m not sure how much of ourselves we have to outgrow to become new again. Our skin regenerates approximately every twenty-seven days. No part of my skin remembers the ocean. Bucket hats are lost in the breeze. Wet feet on the grass are now dry. My hearing is almost gone in my left ear, and with it, the confession whispered into it. It has been twenty-three days that I’ve been without you, and I am anticipating symptoms of withdrawal. Not necessarily because I miss you overwhelmingly, but because our bodies don’t know any way to be other than attached at the hip, holding on for dear life.

When I got the phone call, it was the beginning of October. Day of the dead gained a different meaning. There was no celebration of life, only the whine deep in my throat begging for more time to save yours. It was only yesterday that I could hear her voice through the shower walls. The drip of the tap worked as Morse code and we would stand above the sink, scrying for something to act as savior.

After the attempt, it took more than twenty-seven days to lose that skin. We were iterations, mutterings of who we wished to become. We gave too much blood; were drained before we could understand what it meant to sacrifice. In attempts to erase our own memories, we reverted back to girls in the grass. Girls with blisters burning on the asphalt, tackling each other to the ground as they taught each other what it meant to be held. To carve their nails into backs; to leave their mark and let it sit under the surface, spreading to create a nearly impenetrable barrier. To insert our protectiveness over each other into the system; another layer in the earth’s core. This is what we meant when we told bullies that in order to get to one of us, they’d have to go through the other first. They’d have to buy a pickaxe. Chip at the body until it splintered. There are too many layers of dead skin, hardened into marble. Maybe she was only trying to break out of herself in order for new growth to ensue. Metamorphosis.

Go back to the green. The capability of love when it is laughter. She is kin and I was kindling. Is fire not the same as the sun? She is detox. She is affirmation that out of bad can come good. She is sweat between shoulders. She is the building who was betrayed by its own foundation but is still standing. She is bigger than past selves in jars. She is closed fists. She is open palms. She is trying. She is prayer. sheismoresheismoresheismore.

than her dead

than her living

I am more

than my dead

than my living

we are more

than bodies

in the grass/ in the ground

or fear

in streetlight

we are exit wound

we are inhale

exhale

remember to remember

before you remember to forget