Growing Pains: Take Tylenol.

Or don’t. Tylenol was never allowed in my house. 

She was never allowed in the house either, but she comes anyway. I speak the same three words to her, drawing familiar ruts as they fall from my tongue. They drop like hot syrup on cooled-down pancakes—warm, inviting. We are kings of the world on a stained mattress bed.

Now she takes my hand, and tears fall from feathered lashes. Drip. I call her Emily, feathered names for feathered souls.

Now she’s saying sorry, why is she saying sorry? Sorry and sorry and sorry. I’m sorry too, but I don’t know why.

Now winter comes. Winter comes, and she’s gone.

. . .

Note: There are skeletons in my closet. They’re made of printer paper and soft words. Skeletons belong to the dirt—bury them, hide them underground. I can’t bring myself to bury her. 

At the beginning of this summer, I decided that Ursula wanted Ariel’s voice in order to keep a part of her alive. It was too beautiful of a thing to be set loose in the sea. The waves did not deserve her song, nor did seafoam. I am Ursula, always tempted by honey-soft tones, wanting to reel them in with black tentacles, wanting to call them my own. 

She came with the summer too. One moment green shoots of dandelions and fiddleheads were fighting their way to the surface, struggling to breathe, to taste light and rejoice in the rain. The next moment she was there, an apparition in the heat, like the distant water that recedes every time you draw closer.

I call out to her, and she to me. We are easy together. Flower print with comfortable green vines that climb to the ceiling. We lie in feathers, on gravel roads, on the shimmering glass of the riverbed. We laugh until mouths split and tears fall and the hot ground is watered with mirth. Then we laugh as we cry. Grandma told me the best remedy for a cough was ginger, lemon, and a good long cry. 

Fireflies and lantern bugs, her sweat mingles with the scent of daffodils. I breathe it in. One, two. She intertwines her fingers with mine, and they become the roots of a tree, convoluted branches twisted in an eternal dance. The music stops. No more dancing. 

The willow sweeps the ground as if it's a broom. It’s my broom, and I should be at home. Ma and Ba told me to clean my room this morning, but it can wait. She’s laughing again, and it’s so sweet, oh so sweet, I want to tangle it in my arms and drown with it. She laughs when I tell her this. You are no dragon prince with an underwater palace, she tells me. 

Summer is fading now, long grasses turn bitter, brown, they sway and wave goodbye. We are still at the riverbed, but tadpoles are now croaking as frogs, calling out farewells. She leans into me, and I drink her in. Her lashes are magnified, a dusting of pollen on them, golden and blurred, the last sunlight captured in spider web silk. I hold my breath. I beg myself to not scare her away. 

Featherlight. Emily. Lips do not taste like strawberries. They taste like salt on the cupid’s bow, like damp moss and butterfly wings. Lips taste like lightning, like cotton candy clouds.

Now they taste like fear. . . 

Sloths can sometimes mistake their own arm as a tree branch, grasping themselves with the same surety as the next rung of the ladder, only to realize that there is no ladder at all. And they fall, shooting stars that have given up hope.

Wild eyes and breaths that heave, waves that strain to break the dry edge of the shore. I plead, please don’t run. She turns anyway. She is made of autumn leaves, but she is not brittle. I wonder if I had turned too, would my hair ripple like the pond, buttery sand slipping through fingers? Or would it be a black waterfall? That is what Ba always tells me.

My nail beds cling onto the sand. They refuse to let go.

I sit until the snow falls. The river is frozen, charred to milky white, and so still. Only my breath paints the air now. Opaque, then gone.

A shadow. It’s shaped like Emily. Fingertips tug at the lint in the lining of my winter coat. Chew on the loose skin that hangs from my upper lip. She’s laughing at a boy with golden locks. He pulls her in by the waist.

I spit the broken skin into the grass, and I taste blood.