fauxdelaire

The window was left open through the night so magnolia petals blew in with the morning sun and I woke up cold, pink and white tongues tickling my bare skin, and for a moment I forgot that the city had gutted my heart and I picked my clothes up from off the floor and watched the light etch out all the unfamiliar angles of you and I remembered how sad I would make you and I remembered how old I’ve become and I remembered how we threw the eggshells in the tulips to rot and the dog trampled everything and I chipped my tooth on the last kiss so I’m glad this is goodbye, anyway.

Inspired by Allison Nadeau.

Sometimes I wake up at night to make sure she’s still there, next to me in a wide ocean of darkness and quiet. In my dreams I feel for her freckles, look for her lines; the familiar crest of her body near mine. We will have drifted, inevitably—arm’s length, but barely. She will have unscratched my shoulders with the points of her nails, unhinged my look with her wintry eyes—I will have unclenched my grasp from her curved back and unkissed her smiling mouth. She will seem so far away in the gloom of night, and I can’t sleep without her.

Inspired by the moons of Jupiter.

The windows start to blur together and your face falls away—a handful of crushed flower petals yellow and orange that blow away in the wind and I have to look away, let the rocking boxcar take me home where I should be, and I plug my ears with music from four years ago that makes me think of the pale pale pastel dust that was left caked in the grooves of my fingerprints after art class yellow and orange and blue and green, and as I sit in the train with the colors crying into my ears I realize I stopped being your favorite song some time ago, and the colors in the window are smearing across my eyes in blue and green and yellow and orange and I thought I could hear them but I can’t and I thought I could see them but I can’t 

I see the same people when I come home because I only care about the same people and there are only a few people left back home who are worth putting real clothes on for, anyway, and actually they wouldn’t care if I wasn’t wearing real clothes so it doesn’t matter. When I see her pull up in a red Prius, I decide it’s time for a bra and clean underwear and deodorant because she deserves it. If anyone deserves it, she deserves it. We cruise slowly, waveringly down Swedesford. To someone else she’s polite or elegant or awkward but since I’ve known her for all of this millennium I know it’s probably the product of being noticed and unnoticed for being blond and beautiful in spite of being comfortably white bread and quiet. White-bred white bread. “We Kingans are late bloomers, but when we bloom we become sex flowers.” I don’t think she owned up to her sexiness until college, and only after she was thrown out of the windshield of a car in DC and her body was a sack of broken bones and bruises and I came back from school crying.

Past the shorn cornfields, we talk about this semester’s bad ideas. We want validation and vindication but mostly we just want the other to listen and laugh and shake her head and say “whatever” and not care too much because there are too many people at school who care too much. I notice how thin and white her knuckles are. Her ring is falling off her finger. She’s a nervous driver. Actually no, she’s a bad driver. I’ve witnessed her murder a row of potted tomato plants in Rachel’s driveway and now she’s slowing down to let someone else make a left turn. But I trust her. How can I not? Her nails are perfectly painted green, for the holiday, you know, and she’s wearing a green cardigan as well, and I’m glad that I put on clean panties and pulled my hair up but still, what a fucking pair we make today.

Summer’s garden always allowed visitors, no matter. We found excuses to return after we outgrew humid afternoons spent in the conservatory at the hands of our parents, tugging us through the rose cultivars and nectarines. But we only cared for the orchids, their shriveled alien faces sticking tongues out to taunt us. We bowed to queen cattleya and tore through the topiaries, our cheeks blushing purple. Our laughter tinkled and fell like the spraying fountains that caught the brilliance of the sunset. These were the summers and springs of our kaleidoscopic youth. This was careless innocence sunbathing in love’s perfume. We were blooming cattleyas, and we only bloomed once. This was the last time. The thick smell of memory choked our eyes with tears that slid slowly down our faces like raindrops and drowned the love that would have sprung from our lips, again.  

Inspired by Longwood Gardens and all the hype surrounding our blooming Titan Arum!

“Well, it’s getting late here. I better go.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s late. I’ve got to go.”
“Oh—”
“I’m sorry, for some reason there’s always terrible service when I call you.”
“Can you hear me?”
“Ah, see, there it goes again.”
“Look, before you go—“
“—I think it’s my phone. Or are you on the T?”
“Never mind. Let’s talk later.”
“Okay. I’m going to go.”
“Okay. Bye.”
“Goodbye.”

He looked at the phone that had fallen into his lap, tried to wipe the finger smudges off with the corner of his shirt. It was getting late—his face glowed blue by the light of his cell phone screen. In the many miles of darkness, he looked like just a tiny firefly. He sighed, and the flicker was extinguished. She sighed too, states away. She shoved her phone back into her bag and buckled the seat belt. It would be a short drive home, but already the sun sat on the horizon, bulging like a hitchhiker’s backpack. Every time it ends like this. Their phones are abandoned, heavily—thrown like anchors that only tear gashes in the hulls of their hearts. 

Inspired by Sleigh Bells.

The moonlight leaked through the drapes and I watched it curl around your back, a thin sliver of silver shining in the dark. The night was rich, lush, and comfortable in the way that made me think everything would fall apart if I left just one thing out of place. I tensed up, afraid to enjoy this moment too much in the face of entropy. But you broke the quiet—you tossed the moon off your back and scattered the stars when you turned around to kiss me.  

In sunshine like this we’ll remember our youth:
golden (the summer skins, tanned and peeled off
in grubby rolls; the sunsets that left us shoulder-
shivering on the Slope)
sweet (the pancakes in the morning, hot on our hot
young tongues; the sloppy wine-smiles)
and sticky (the beer-moss on our teeth and tongues;
the bloody fall that left a shadow-scar; the messes,
the messes, and all of the mistakes).

Inspired by Slope Day, Ben Folds.

“Would you mind holding onto some stuff for me?” you said, and I thought of how all that remained of your childhood was a gutted house and the snaking path from your place to mine, so I took the box out of your hands on a chilly January morning. I felt fine about it. A favor for an old friend. When we smiled goodbye at each other, the clouds of our exhales danced in the sun. We hugged. I locked the door again. You drove off in an unfamiliar car.

I didn’t need to untuck the flaps to know what they were holding back: CDs and CDs and CDs. Some of our old letters. Mostly, though, all the songs I gave you. All the songs you taught me. Look, it was years ago but these things still feel the same—just a little simpler. A little blander.

I put it under my bed. I didn’t want to read into what this meant, you giving all of this back to me. It seemed so unlikely that this shoebox could hold it all together. All these songs, all this time. High school. The second Bush administration—captured in polycarbonate and pulp. I thought of how easy it was for you to just give this to me and drive off forever, and a month later when I clean my room, finally, I think of how easy it is for me to forget that this feeling isn’t new, either. That we loved and left once, already, before. 

God, wasn’t it a mess that first night. I remember tearing through the street, blind, skipping headlights and kissing raindrops. It was the kind of cold outside that might have, later on, encouraged you to drape an old college sweatshirt around my shoulders. But my skin was hot and balmy when I showed up at your door that night. Muddy, smelling like trees. You were cool to the touch, you were always so cool. I held your skin between my teeth and parted your hair with my lips. The shadows on the wall danced with the lightning. And soon everything was dark. You kissed me, and you held me. We let the bed define us by negative space.
You said is this okay. Are you okay. God, you feel good.
I said shut up. Don’t call me baby. Don’t call me babe. Don’t call me.

Inspired by Crystal Castles & Robert Smith.