august

You are seven years old on a field of crushed clover, thrusting a palm into the open air and watching a body collapse onto the dirt as if the invisible surge of your own magic forced them down, their angry shouts of un-fair rising up like dust because you won a game of your own making, and your shoes are canvas and threadbare, full of holes and memories your parents paid for, but your lungs are full of the damp, green scent of earth and the grit at the back of your throat from rolling down the hill, feeling immortal, believing the afternoon would stretch forever and that every day would end with grazed knees and friends within shouting distance, and you spend years waiting on the end of a month, desperate for eighteen and aching for twenty-one, romanticizing the quiet glory of getting into a car and going anywhere by yourself, dreaming of the day you could buy your own liquor and drink until the night blurred, never understanding that the freedom to go places alone becomes the habit of always being alone, that distance slowly swallows your friends into quiet blue bubbles on a screen, that the world’s vivid hues drain out until the sky is just a dull, bleached grey, and suddenly you are in your twenties—a number people call young, though the youth has been stripped clean out of it—because there is no play left, and there’s bills to pay at the beginning of each month, and the phantom powers you held at seven have rotted into a terrifying loss of control, where the only magic remaining is how fast a month disappears, and now you walk into stores to buy your own shoes just to tread water, and you blink once, twice, and find yourself on the bathroom floor of your apartment, cheap wine searing the back of your tongue, snot and salt wet against your lip because you’ve spent hours calculating the weight of standing up and decided against it, but if you close your eyes just enough, the harsh fluorescent overheads blur into the pale wash of an August sky, and the bite of the ceramic tile beneath your cheek stops feeling cold and starts to feel like the cool, damp earth after running until your chest burned, the silence in the room softening into that same suspended, motionless moment on the field when the world briefly paused and you were everything and anything you thought to be, and so you fold a towel beneath your head, letting the world spin without you for a few quiet seconds, remembering that even in all this mess, you will never be this young again, and for one breath, you decide to just lay still and savor it.

moments

You just turned twenty three and you’re standing alone in your kitchen having not said a word to another human in several hours, you’re waiting for your brita to fill with water as you realize the floor beneath you needs to be swept, you have spent the last few moments of your life deciding not to kill yourself despite having had the urge since you turned fourteen, and you begin to think about the wine you have in your fridge and if you should ever open it, because if you do you have to finish it in two days or you have wasted the bottle, then the laundry you told yourself you would do tomorrow which is today, but now tomorrow, and the letter you never sent to your relative even though you told them you would, and how you found yourself a therapist because your mother never did even having asked for many years, and how the skin touching the floor somehow doesn’t feel like yours anymore, you think about how you should call someone when you start to feel like this, the number in your phone you would go to, how someone in the world right now knows every intimate detail about your life yet you don’t speak to anymore, all the times you’ve silently cried on a floor, or on the subway, or staring at yourself in the bathroom mirror, reciting paragraphs of all the things you would say if given the chance but never do when that chance comes, you feel overwhelmed by shame, for feeling the way you feel, and within those small moments you begin to feel trapped by nostalgia, remembering you’ll never be this young again, and recognizing also this is the first time you’ve ever been this old, and still don’t know how to change your own tire if the day ever comes, that somehow every choice you’ve made led you to standing in your kitchen on this dirty floor, and you look out the window at the apartments across from you, knowing there should be moments where you fall in love with the world, but the paper cut between your index finger burns, and you can’t quite remember why you first wanted to, but decide this is your body, and someday you will chose how to kill it, that sixteen year old you will be proud when you do, but that right now you have no where else to be except here, and for the first time in your life you will believe in fate, and that fate has led you through every mistake, and every trauma, and brought you here, to this kitchen, waiting for the world to stop spinning so you can feel sane again.

All the Lives We Live

Published in The Carson Review 2021

The Literary Arts Journal of Marymount Manhattan College 221 E. 71st Street
Department of English & World Literatures
New York, New York 10021

Details in the Back

There's something powerful about the silence you experience during something traumatic. When you simply block the noise out and only see the colors. Passing passing like cars on the street, but you can't, in fact, hear anything. You can only remember the hues, the smell, the softness of your cashmere sweater. You don't hear the words, but you understand their faces. And you're silent too because you aren't, in fact, processing anything. You just exist there at that moment, and when you look back on it, you can't really say anything ever happened at all because you were focusing too much on the details in the back. I remember the room was blue, baby blue; I remember the red t-shirt he was wearing. I don't know why he said he wanted to break up, but I can still smell the cedar cologne he was wearing. I remember I was crying. I remember him yelling, I remember the deep maroon color of my blood when I ripped the glass shard out from the frame he threw me against, but I don't remember the slurs he was using. I guess that's how I am. I block everything out. And at night, when I try and sleep, my ceiling becomes a projection of these moments, these traumas. And I watch them replay over and over again. I watch my first kiss, the way it was forced, the broken swing on the playground. I see my dog Snoopy on the floor of the Vet's office, looking into my eyes, thanking me for letting her go, the olive blanket she was lying on. I remember the wood table I stood on as a kid, pretending to be Princess Ariel on her rock in the ocean, my father's anger when he saw me. I can describe every single Lego we had in the toy box, but I can't tell you the words that came from my father's mouth when he yelled at me. I'm afraid I'm living my life constantly keeping in and blocking out, because at a young age, I was handed a script to memorize. I was to only answer what I was asked and ask the same question back. I had never thought to question it, considering in most cases, it was the only applicable dialogue. My thoughts, however, have changed. Humans aren't a cutout, and one size does not fit all. Why has the script not changed after all this time? It has become another greeting rather than an honest good intended question. We are conditioned unknowingly to answer when asked and to not speak unless given permission. Being asked, "How are you?" shouldn't have a concrete answer. Some days I'm a pale blue, the sky's color right before it rains, the cold chill on the concrete. Or I'm the ink, the sticky black ink that bleeds from my pen as I write sappy poems in the dark corner of my room. Some mornings, I’m the steam that comes from the fresh pour of coffee into my mug and the warm embrace on my fingers as I wrap them around it. How I am is never concrete, it should never be defined by a word. I am in a constant state of flux between things and places and sounds, and they need to come out, these stories need to be told. Because, I no longer wish to be polite. I'm tired of pretending what's wrong doesn't exist. I'm conditioned to store the memories away, tuck my feelings into bed, answer the question with "good, how are you?" But I am human, and good is no longer good enough.

Published in New York University Literary Magazine: The Rational Creature, Vo. 8 “How are you?”