-xii-
for an old friend
I remember you, brown eyes catching gold in sunlight like pans in the Mississippi river--dipped in, dipped out by sun-worn brown hands and leather-jacket skin. I remember you and wonder who you are today, thirteen years later, whether you still write your ‘t’s like ‘j’s, with the top curved like a fishing hook, but softer, as though you were afraid of piercing the paper with its sharp end. my handwriting was better than yours--classic double-spaced nelson script and big, bold letters that always read as though my heart could not be loud enough. I was quiet, I remember you first said, but I was also the girl who pretended hula hoops were dragon wings and chucked erasers at the girl in pigtails who sat in the row to our right. I was the girl who became friends with everyone, the girl you helped in the smallest of ways--you probably don't remember, but I do, things like searching for a lost bag, things like patting me on the shoulder when I wanted to cry. you probably don’t remember this, but you were kind, and I remember thinking ‘all friends should be like this, should be like this, should be’.
I wonder if you still have kind eyes. I wonder where you went, what you are doing, I wonder if you still catch gold when you flick your lashes upwards, if you write your ‘t’s the same way you used to in first grade. I wonder if you remember the girl who was your best friend, the girl who is--at least these days--lost in a memory, always, a waltz where she stands on the edge of some massive change and closes her eyes for fear of the vertigo that she is not even certain exists. because this girl is not the girl you knew; she is rolled up and singed at the edges, like a cigarette, she is cruel and cold and cynical and smoke pierces through her nostrils when she speaks, smoke but for want of something to ignite herself with. she is frightened; her hula hoops are constricting and she has nightmares about them, about wings flapping in the distance, of being unable to fly. her eyes could never catch gold. her eyes are dull and cavernous and sometimes they light up and melt out of sheer longing for something out of reach. she dreams in sentences, in colours spinning like shackles around her ankles; she dreams of turning heartsong into art and she curls up at the edges when she knows she cannot. when she knows she is destined to fail.
she still remembers you. there was poetry within eyes, she used to feel, a cipher for better things, for dreams that she spread like marbles along the bottom of an aquarium; these days the water is greasy and dirt cakes the glass. she cannot be bothered to clean it. she cannot be bothered to dream.
she has closed her eyes for a vertigo that is not there. she knows she cannot catch gold no matter how she blinks, no matter how she tries, she knows there is no poetry for the kind of apathy that tears her into tiny pieces douses them in gasoline and runs a matchstick along her teeth. I wonder if you would recognise her still.
I wonder if you would want to.
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