01.15.2024

i think of my teenaged self with painful frequency– a pathology that accompanies growth while my anatomy always stays the exact same size. only my hands get rougher with age and all else stays soft. she is my sister and we hold hands. together, we are holding a wishbone on two opposite ends, never breaking it, pulling it gently between our index fingers and our thumbs. tension is a familiar friend with a kind face. tension is the carcass of a flightless bird, feathers intact.

on my walks, i practice out loud what i would say to her should we ever meet. should we ever bump into each other on the street, at the diner, at the laundromat, at the pharmacy. the types of places where time is a stagnant, sporing thing. God made the southwest this way for a reason, they say. slowness can be a church and a cathedral. slowness can be the ringing of a brass bell, pulled with a thick rope and strong arms. here, i imagine a collision of our limbs in a public way, one that can be witnessed by strangers. they are wiping their glasses against their shirts, they are pushing their glasses up their faces to get a better look. we are wrapping ourselves around a larger warm body, twisting and faceless. something stuffed with a polyester filling. i know she would be a daggered thing. the image of a young girl with a kitchen knife in her backpack front pocket.

a child undoing the pleating of her mother’s braids, leaving the house without a jacket, biting every other cuticle into a raw contortion. it is something about remembering the orientation of my fingers, ball-jointed and plastic. the juvenile thought of a manufactured pain has never left me. i imagine it sitting in a pretty gold frame, above somebody’s childhood bed, but not my own. i am only the curator and i am only here for a short time. to feel that distinct stiffness when reaching for something you cannot quite see. ripening fruit over some ledge. prenatal vitamins on a high shelf at the cooperative market. blisters from ungiving shoes, unevenly worn soles. i knew then that the things that make you feel something must be real.

the memory of a high school bonfire where they burned our lacquered chairs. signs and symbols carved into the undersides, their chipping wooden stomachs, with keys and pens. in my pockets: arcade tokens, cash, loose tylenol and codeine phosphate mixed pills. the currency of nascency, of a running nose, of too-long sleeves. my back is against a boy’s legs. not even his legs, his bones, configured in a way that is synthetically skeletal. like those rod supported hanging anatomy figures in a biology classroom, draped with white labcoats. those appendages all dangling and foreign feeling. you can imagine putting your fingers in between its fingers when nobody is looking. i imagine cracking my growth plates (calcaneus, distal tibia, proximal tibia, distal femur, distal radius – in this particular order) apart from their coalesced states. when they age skeletal remains, these are the gaps they are searching for.

if i hold you just like this, will you stay the same?