Young Writers Society

day 11 - an extended metaphor about lemonades

the first time i kissed a boy it was like drinking
flat lemonade, lukewarm, oddly bitter.
it had been left out in the sun for too long and
i'm not sure what i remember more,
the rough grass beneath my palms, his lips,
the soft thud of a basketball missing the hoop,
the trashcan 500m away
or the quicksand panic rising in my throat
of a summer caught in a solar eclipse.

i'm told, this is not how the story usually goes.
that lemonade carries the citrus sweetness of youth,
its sour uncertainty
giving way to the sweet effervescent rush of a heart (so full) to love.
when skin meets skin. but all i can think about is how the first time i opened
my heart (full of love), someone gouged it open and used it to paint their own red.
i think there are still pieces of my heart stitched somewhere on the ceiling of a person's heart chamber beating out a broken melody, waiting for an echo that would never match its own.
or maybe i'm wrong, maybe i damned my story when i was three,
my parents gave me money to go buy a lemonade from the corner store.
and i bought home the wrong lemonade. and they said, "how could you be so
stupid".
maybe that's when it all went wrong.
-
the dude on the court makes a shot at a hoop again, and this time
the ball swishes through the hoop, punctuating the ground
with a solid thud. the boy takes a sip of the lemonade out the corner of my eyes,
and i think about how the court lights make the edge of the trashcan
look like a glistening edge of a knife
sharp enough to cut apart the sun.

17 - oedipus

18+ for mentions of drug use and suicide

Spoiler! :

i'm not a believer of faith, because i never felt like
i needed to look for something to believe in.
in my youth, we
smoked on the roof of your car and you told me about the different kinds of weed
sativa, indica, ruderalis and i thought it was poetry. but really, it was an epilogue
in disguise to a story we should have never taken part in.
when we were together,
i kissed you with gin soaked lips and tequila eyes, because i'm not sure what love is
(so maybe this is it honey)-i can't feel anything at all, and maybe that's a blessing in disguise.
because otherwise maybe i wouldn't have been here at all.
it's past midnight and i'm skinny dipping in the ocean in june and believed it to be the moonlight in december- believing that when you said you would stay, and never leave.
it was as true as the sun in august. and when you left
i think i finally understood,
why peopled looked for something to believe in.

i'm not a gardener, and it's not because i don't
want to bloom flowers instead of bruises every time i touch something.
but i'm unsure of how to grow something anew, when all i see is red
on my hands from the cuts i've had to stitch together.
tiny scars
sedated in my palms, soothed barely by the promise they remain a memory and skeleton of the past. but i feel them throbbing every spring, waiting to rupture through the soil
maybe
if i try hard enough, i can pretend they're cardinals, waiting for spring to bloom
and when they do maybe this time
i'll just let them be