May 2016
My ability to stick is just as strong as a Command hook, and my ability to stick around is just as weak as one. The way the end of the school year tugs at my tanned ankles dangling off the dock; the way the end of May yanks me into the river, into the pond, into the Atlantic and whips me in circles and swirls until it flicks me through the warm blue bubbles and I wash up onto a shore that's as bare as the walls were on move in day, as they are on move in day.
I roll into its emptiness, and the sand starts to speckle my hair like my hair speckles the increasingly no-longer-blank floor every morning I comb out the thick knots of my black waves - dark like the sea but white at the crashes, white at my crashes, dark like the sea, dark from what you first see, but then past the splashes, the white at my crashes, my streaks of age - my streaks of fourteen - my "cool sparkle," my "gray looks chic," my "I swear they're silver," my "it's just genetic," my "yeah it makes you grow up quickly."
There is a jar of quarters, silver and chunky as my hair, clinking at the corner of my desk; my life is a dollar; my is life what the vending machine used to charge for a cool, crisp, fresh, fierce Sprite at midnight in 2011-
my life under the same roofs as vending machines is to my life under the sun and moon:
as a quarter as silver as my hair is to the full of a green lemon-limey bottle ---
It's a ratio; a ray shone, away blown into the where I'm whipped and whirled into the waves of the warm bubbly blue; a ray shone but away sown into the bubblies now so blue that they're black like my waves. There is no more light, not even white. The white, maybe mine, too, is gone, for once, like I for always wished and wanted. But now is the color, too.
The ocean is black like my hair. The Sprite is black, like three-quarters of my past I have forgotten because they're no longer cool, crisp, fresh, fierce.
Now I am smaller. The other quarters no longer linger as my depth in the lurking shadows. They have drifted, drowned, in the ocean of last year before I washed up onto the shore as bare as the walls on move in day. I am smaller. I am just a quarter-but now that's my whole.
"Living away from home is hard in college-but you're used to it. You've done it all of high school," they said.
They told me I'd change. I thought that meant changing into a different me. Not into a new being altogether.
"Away from home" - until the bare walls and bare shores are your home.
I can't even say I hate being tugged so easily. There's something freeing about losing it all every spring. After five years in dorms, I've maintained over a quarter of my life with respect to an annual clock that grows cold and expired just when the world is warm and blooming.
I don't love me - because I don't know me. I can't - anytime I get close, I'm washed up onto another shore as bare as the walls on move in day.
Though - I don't hate me, necessarily. I just hate how I have trouble loving me or anything because I have trouble knowing me or anything before I'm whipped back into the black boiling black bubblies.
It's amazing how a year fits in a few boxes, I told myself at the first year, at fourteen. Yeah plus some bins, perhaps a suitcase or two, tucked away in a dark, dim, damp basement back behind shut doors for the brightest months.
It's amazing how two years
how three,
how four, five years fit in a few boxes.
It's amazing how all the years that are still yours fit in a few boxes.
It's amazing how the only years that are still yours fit in a few boxes.
Even if I can't feel it,
stick me like a Command hook because I can't help but peel like one.