Day 4

Suddenly there is laughing to my left and I turn my head. At first, I can’t quite make out who it is that’s walking towards me, a ray of sunlight slicing through a break in the leaves and blurring my vision. I see a gaggle of legs in sneakers and jeans and skirts. Then I can make out a girl with a long blond ponytail, her eyes squeezed closed in a laugh that undulates from her chest with a raspiness that is more distinguishable to me than my own voice. It’s Brianna and her group of friends. My chest tightens when I see them, and I think about picking up my stuff and leaving, but they’re too close now. My knees are straining underneath me, locked with anticipated movement, but I restrain myself. Suddenly, they’re passing by me in a herd of melodious voices and laughter and frivolity, discolored by a haze of sunlight.

I try not to, but in spite of my efforts, my eyes skim the crowd and suddenly, they find Brianna’s. For a moment, our eyes meet. Mine, brown. Hers, deep hazel-green—murky pond water, we used to laugh. This contact makes her just as uncomfortable as it makes me, and her eyes skitter from the grass back to me, color embellishing her freckled face. She offers a slight twinge of the corners of her lips, a semi-smile. She waggles her fingertips in a little hello.

“Hey,” she says quietly, and her friends smile in my direction, waving, a chorus of “hey, Nat.” Their hands flutter like tree leaves, sunlight dancing through the interstices of their fingers.
“Hey,” I say back.

The next thing I know, the moment has vanished and they are halfway across the lawn. I press my back firmly against the tree. Brianna used to be my best friend, from elementary school when we would smear paint on each other’s faces all the way through the first year of high school. But over the summer between freshman and sophomore year, Brianna was somehow swept into another group of girls. Her skirts became shorter and her weekends filled up for days before I’d think to ask her to hang out. Her phone became filled with pictures of her and the other girls, the ones who are loud about the fact that they drink and who drive around with boys all the time.

This transition made sense to me for a number of reasons. First off, Brianna was beautiful. She possessed a sort of timeless essence about her that preserved itself in a set of enigmatic features, from the angular semblance of her jawline and cheekbones to the seriousness of her eyes. It was either become absorbed into the pack or be the brunt of merciless envy of the other girls, the kind that makes you feel sick inside when you look at your own reflection. If I was Brianna, I would’ve weighed my options and chosen the better alternative, too.

Secondly, it was evident that we had begun to grow apart by the start of high school. This is through no fault of hers, but through mine. While in elementary school we had entertained each other through raucous laughter and mischief, Brianna’s love of these things had only increased with time, whereas I lost interest. I could’ve tried to be a little more lively, but it never even occurred to me. I had noticed it, this folding into myself, and just figured that it was the process of growing up and that my friendship with Brianna would simply sculpt itself to fit this new dynamic.

This was too high of an expectation. I get that now. But it didn’t stop the hurting of her fading out. If she would just get it over with and be mean to me, things would be so much easier. It’s these interactions I can’t take, the friendly encounters, the lingering invitation of our friendship. It’s through these painful gestures of politeness I understand that if I would just be a little more fun, a little more spirited, there would be a place waiting for me in Brianna’s life. Through this, she is exempt from blame of the loss of our friendship, and it is my responsibility to sweep up the ashes and dispose of them quietly.

At one point, I believe there was a window in which the development of my adolescent brain possessed a malleable quality that would’ve allowed for this transformation to take place. A time in which laughter becomes louder, dancing becomes second-hand, and the language, dirtier. But I missed this window, somehow oblivious to the transition that was apparent to all the other girls. It’s just something that can’t be forced. And so, I sweep.

Day 3

 

Lunch is by 11:30. I’m never hungry by then. In fact, hardly anybody is hungry by then, and if they are they’ll just eat in second period to stave off boredom. Instead, I abandon the cafeteria and its pizza smell, the smell that the day-old box leaves in your recycling bin, and I head outside to the school lawns.

Today is the first day this September that the air has felt brisk. The leaves flutter softly overhead, waving their little hands, beams of soft midmorning sunlight still lingering in their branches. The air feels sharp and cool, I breathe it in through my nose, feel it settle into my lungs. Outside, the loud noises of school that are accentuated by the long corridors of lockers and feet slapping tile and yelling voices are dimmed. People shouting seems muffled by the expanse of the sky, and it simple drifts into the air as a mellowed background noise. Mrs. Evans let us out a little bit early, so I am one of the first ones to walk across the lawn. I head directly for my favorite tree, before it can be claimed by the group of hoodied boys and their skateboards.  

The tree is on the outskirts of the lawn. It is almost technically part of the woods that extends past or school, but encroaching just barely enough onto school property that we’ve claimed it as our own. It’s an old oak, branches tangling up towards the sky like a skeleton, hollow, moss-covered. But the bark is solid and strong, ridged with a hundred little lines that ripple across its trunk as thinly and intricately as a spider web. When I was in elementary school here, I used to think that it was the oldest tree in the world. In part because it stood out from the rest of the young, fresh pine trees and maples that bordered the schooler’s property, looking like a mangled piece of junk metal in comparison to the youthful frames of the other trees. Secondly, because my imagination couldn’t comprehend a tree that could possibly look more wise, more majestic than this one. I could have been very easily swayed that the tree possessed some sort of magic.

I throw my backpack onto the ground and sit down onto the grass. It’s slightly wet with dew but I don’t mind. I lean against the trunk of the tree, feel the crinkles and creases of its bark against my backbone. I close my eyes and let my breath pour out of me. School is so stifling, underneath the fluorescent lights and the oppressive stares of a thousand eyes, sometimes I feel like I go entire days without truly breathing. My body stiffens and becomes robotic this way, and I don’t even notice until I leave at the end of the day and my body moves like an automaton. I hold my breath inside of me like a ring of water on the mouth of a cup, quivering on edge of overflow, held together by surface tension. But here, I let it drain away, the clouds overhead absorbing all of my breath and drifting away.

I wonder if I lie here long enough, I will have an imprint of this tree on my back. A thousand little lines sprawling against my skin, red, depressed into my flesh like scars. Like a lightning-strike survivor. I open my eyes and poke my back through my T-shirt, but the skin is taut and smooth under my finger. 

It’s 11:45, and the lawn has gathered a smattering of students across its vivid horizon. Sprawled out, lumps of backpacks, collections of bodies. Faint reverberation of their shouting and obnoxious music drifts across the field. I watch as the boys high-five each other, dance, punch each other.The girls talk in huddled circles, enclosed, forming a ring with their backs turned t the rest of the world. Occasionally another one will come and sling her backpack down, the circle will widen to include her, and the gossip will grow increasingly limited until there’s nobody to talk about behind their backs and they all go onto their cell phones and make petty conversation about how stressed they are or the parties they’re planning.

Watching them all is like observing a murder of crows. You know that there is some system at play here, some method to their hierarchy, but from far away it simply looks like chaos. Often times I am roped into these conversations, absorbed into the ring like a fish being swept into a current. I think they pity me, these girls, because they’re terrified of being alone. Seeing anybody by themselves reminds them that they, too, have the possibility of ending up on the outside. They’d rather gossip about things that don’t interest them or scroll pointlessly on their phones than sit by themselves, where the thoughts they submerge into the recesses of their minds will surface. As a result of this fear, I am often waved over by one of them, a large plastic smile sizzling on their face like it has been seared on. They beckon me over, tell me what’s up, how’s it going, we haven’t seen you in so long, we miss you. I smile and say what’s up, yeah, me too. That’s the extent of the conversation. I don’t mind them, these girls, it’s just that I would rather they leave me alone than waste their energy on polite lies.

Suddenly there is laughing to my left and I turn my head. At first, I can’t quite make out who it is that’s walking towards me, a ray of sunlight slicing through a break in the leaves and blurring my vision. At first I see a gaggle of legs in sneakers and jeans and skirts. Then I can make out a girl with a long blond ponytail, her eyes squeezed closed in a laugh, her laugh undulating from her chest with a raspiness that is more distinguishable to me than my own voice. It’s Brianna and her group of friends. My chest tightens when I see them, and I think about picking up my stuff and leaving, but they’re too close now. My knees are straining underneath me, locked with anticipated movement, but I restrain myself.

Nina

One of the most startling realities of the situation was, when investigated more closely, there really wasn’t anything so special about Nina. To pin her up against a board and dissect her features piece by piece, like the anatomizing of a rare species of butterfly, would reveal a number of human qualities: blond hair that frizzes against either side of her scalp, a pale complexion whose pinkish pallidity makes her lips difficult to distinguish from the rest of her face, and an average height that is often disguised by moderately-heeled ankle boots. Overall, as a creature evaluated behind an objective barrier that excludes all remnants of human inclinations, she was really quite ordinary. However, remove, the boundary (if such a thing could ever exist), and the complications of emotion interfere with the picture.

Firstly, she was the “new girl”. I’m sure that regardless of stature or aesthetics, being the fresh face in a sea of uninteresting people whose particularities have long since melded into unrecognized and commonplace features can only serve you well. However, it wasn’t only this new sense of arrival that drew our eyes to her like hungry moths to a luminous flame; it was also her command of attention.

She had no shyness–not even a drop of self-consciousness–in her warm-blooded body. She was bold and unapologetic. She would laugh loudly at inappropriate jokes, a spew of giggles that unraveled in spurts of endearing raspiness and high-pitched chortles. If she didn’t like the way someone was acting, she’d roll her eyes and say, “For the love of God.” Taken aback by her confidence, anybody would stop mid-sentence, with eyes widened with sudden awareness of self that was inextinguishable. Nina’s legs sprawled, uninhibited, underneath the desk. Boys whose legs usually sat, wide-kneed and unapologetic, suddenly drew in with timidity. Nina had a possession of authority, but seemed completely unaware of it.

Because of this, her name spread around the lips of everyone and anyone who had met her. Sometimes, it would be a mere topic of conversation, you’ll never believe what Nina said today, and was typically met with a falsetto spew of laughter that rang with slight envy and amazement at whatever they had found amusing in her that day. Other times, it would be coiled in hushed conversation, whose content would remain behind drawn curtains, did you hear what Nina did, and bore the jealousy of girls who can’t stand to see someone else’s confidence illuminate the lack of their own.

I watched her carefully, myself. Fortunate enough to have classes with her, I had a healthy spread of time in which I could indulge the corner of my curious eye with observation. I was startled when she entered class, in shirts whose hems hung just above her stomach. I studied her closely for signs of self-consciousness of the line of pale skin that banded her waist like the sun-bleached ring that appears on stones collected from the beach. I was confounded by the fact that she didn’t seem to hide herself. Her body lied languorously in her desk, limbs sprawling, hair spread across her shoulders. She wasn’t like the other girls whose clothing hung around their bodies–revealing a glimpse of a thin shoulder here, a peep of exposed waistline there–whose arms probed their stomachs nervously and gently pulled folds of their clothing out from their frame as they spoke. When Nina raised her hand, she didn’t bring one hand to her waist and one arm up, halfway, hovering. She thrust her arm all the way up in the air and if her hand wasn’t noticed promptly enough, she just spoke.

I watched her with awe as she gnawed on the rim of water bottle. I smiled to myself when she swore loudly when the teacher moved to collect last night’s homework and how nobody seemed to care. Not even the teachers penalized her, so hypnotized by her confidence were they: just like the rest of us. Amazing. I watched her with a gleaming mixture of pride, you can do it, and amazement, how do you do it, and a sliver of hope that toyed in the back of my mind, I wish I could do it.

The Pact

We sit on a dock, its body extending into the water like the sun-baked body of a snake. The sky overhead is a deep blue of July, clouds large and lumbering but not promising rain. The sun pours down all around us, dripping into the lake and into our hair in puddles, lingering on our eyelashes. I sit with my feet into the water, which still carries a chill. My two friends have their bodies sprawled against the bleached wood of the dock, their arms dipping into the water below. Their pale skin and the crescent moons of their fingernails reflect light, causing fractals of light to dance around their hands. We have been sitting here for a while, but we don’t know how long. Time eludes us. It seems to sprawl itself into the landscape of lake Champlain and unwind slowly, each blade of grass bending from its weight.

“Do you think we’ll still be friends in high school?”

Someone has asked this question. I do not remember if it has originated from my mouth, or somebody else’s, but we are all thinking the same thing. Quietly, we let this idea brew in us. We know that high school is approaching, and our sense of realism is developing. We study each other’s differences, aloof. This one’s too popular to hang out with us anymore. The other one is too interested in school to pay attention to what’s going on. This one is too bored with her life and will seek adventure elsewhere. We know that we are being evaluated by each other, but we don’t say how.

“Of course we will.”

This is the definite answer we have come up with. And because of this half second of reassurance, suddenly we believe it. Although I detect doubt from myself and my friends, I believe it. I must. I look across to watch their bodies, the sun coloring their skin. In this moment, my friends are all the world I know. For years, we have nearly lived together. Sleeping at each other’s houses every Friday night, playing endless and pointless card games, staying up until three in the morning just talking. We have confessed secrets, we have admitted fears, told inappropriate jokes. I have come to know their homes as part of my own. It is sprawled in their kitchens, making microwavable macaroni and cheese and watching Parks and Recreation, that I have fit in. We have hung up the phone saying “I love you”. We have cried and laughed and hated each other, only to come running back on Monday morning with arms full of hugs and apologies.

“Let’s make a pact. Even if things change, we’ll all still be friends.”

High school does not seem real to me. In my mind, I envision what books and TV shows have shown me. The adult aspects of pressures of college and the oncoming independence seem too far off, like I am being given something I am too little to carry. Something in me feels that the onslaught of all these new variables were impossible for us. As we sit on the dock, even though we have the entire summer ahead of us, it seems like the last moment we will still be together. I feel, stirring deep inside me, that we are growing up and have been selected for new fates, diverging off into the world and carry pieces of our shared memories with us.

None of us could envision what our lives would be like. We could never have guessed that before the end of middle school, one of us breaks the pact. How we watched, hearts bitter and mournful, as she faded into the rest of the crowd, with newer and better friends. We would never have guessed that by freshman year, another of of us would have broken the pact, falling into trouble at her new school with drugs, and cutting us out from her life. We would never have guessed that I would be the last one, holding the words of our promise in my hand, tiny and feathered like the fragile body of a bird. We never guessed that I would make new friends, find new places to hang out after school. That I would pass through the halls and become a stranger to them.

But now, sitting on the dock, sun on our faces.

“I promise.”

“I promise.”

“I promise.”

 

Cold Morning/Train

I wake up early with my jaw clenched and my fists tightened.

My body bracing against the cold

The fan is blowing in cold air,

drawing it from outside and

spewing it into the confined space of my room.

I can tell from the thin, crisp quality of the breeze

that autumn has finally started its descent upon us.

My room has a crystal clear, pale atmosphere;

the skylight letting in white light

that sections itself off into different corners of the room.

I see my boxes stacked in the corner.

They are neat and yet disorganized.

Sitting patiently as though I had been planning

to take them and whisk off to somewhere

important,

Somewhere where I cannot hear the acceleration of the train,

the clanging announcing its departure,

growing faster and louder and infecting my thoughts with

what’s real, what’s real, what’s real.

I Wish I Had Time

But would that I might

endure this time in pitiful joy;

Pitiful not due to my own satisfaction but

rather the obscure passions I must entertain

to take it.

If only time was not a measurement used against my advantage;

if only I bore omnipotence in my touch that I could extend its atmosphere and toil in its breaches…

If only I could father the whims of aging and the happy frivolity of youth; know them all and yet still wonder at their composition (when does it stop being one and start being the other? A moment, a phase? A hiccup in our attentions?)

If only I could bribe time,

give myself over to its undulating force,

and let the world spin in suspension on a thread

of my own design.

To weave myself in between grains of sand that mark our losses

and dive through the hourglass to catch them,

hold them in my palm,

to stop the maddening pace of it.

If only I had time.

Writing Prompt from English Class

Every morning in English class, we free write for 2-5 minutes. The teacher writes a prompt on the board. On this particular Tuesday morning the prompt was, more or less: You time-traveled to the future. When you time-travel back, you try to fix everything from destruction.
I wrote a poem sort of about this.
(I chose not to use proper grammar because it seemed more poignant.)

A memory caught up in the words of
reality
I remember what it was like
to run through the streets
barefooted
smiling
I remember what life had built
when I was young
and the cities were gleaming and bright
I remember a time
when the paralyzing realization
did not seep through my unconscious mind
and color my dreams with fragments
of this new
cold
black
world.