I want to say I’ll remember you this way,

the way you are on a Monday morning, when your hair was short and your curls sprung from your head in rays of gold, and summer was

forever.

I want to say I’ll think of you like I did

on a Thursday evening, tucking fake diamonds like secrets into your palms, hiding your smile beneath lipstick as dark as the paint beneath my fingernails,

a spring awakening.

After, I remember the awkwardness,

the discomfort of you, the way you looked when you flirted, the way

your shoulders snapped to your ears like a deer in the headlights, as I sat with a boy I’d never met and will never meet again,

alone in a sea of machines

Abandoned, affection curdles in my chest,

the way wood glue curdles on the tips of your fingers, curling into itself like

your dirty socks in the back of my car, as you pressed your lips to mine, and I pulled

away.

I’m not confused, except for in all the ways that I am.

You had him, his golden hair and sunshine smiles, his careless laughter and confident uncertainty, scattering jokes like abandoned seedlings in the wilderness of the world, and he

had you, your knife-sharp eyeliner and bullet-shaped sarcasm, reckless and self-assured in your own destruction, hurling like a meteor into danger like you always knew you’d make it out alive, and I

had you, on rooftops and stairwells and under basement lights, breathing smoke into my mouth with every dark ring you left on my lips, until

you had him. And then

you had me.

Which of us was it, that wasn’t enough?

sometimes I think I’ve lived too long

when I see my life on paper

a list of accomplishments

not made, risks

not taken.

if life is linear, mine is a downward curve

over almost before it’s begun,

weighed down

by fervent hope

and frustrated expectation

(optimism, my deepest curse).

my dreams are not a thing with feathers

they curdle within me,

unspoken, and

if I opened my window to breathe them free

they would evaporate

like tissue paper

in the humid city air

crumble into dust and

decay.

my future is the mousetrap to my life

do I take the jaws

or the poison?

chàbùduō (差不多 )

(adj.) similar, about the same;

(adv.) almost, nearly, approximately

_____________________

chàbùduō (差不多 )

(statement, inflection word, a feeling)

(adj.) good, bad, all right, about the same;

(adv.) good enough, almost there, just about correct;

indistinguishable, muddled together, an inseparable mess;

(adj.) mathematically approximate, metaphorically comparable;

(n.) an inherent contradiction

Ex: chàbùduō de fānyì(差不多的翻译), an impossible translation

When you ask me, I don’t tell you the truth.

It’s midnight in middle school, your pillow tucked beneath my chin, and when your face turns towards mine they do too, hungry eyes gleaming in anticipation.

I lie.

Blond hair. Ten million freckles.

Everyone oohs, giggling behind the collars of their pajamas. (Three days later, he’ll ask me to be his girlfriend; he dumps me after less than a week.)

His eyes were almost as blue as yours.

When I think of you, I think of primary colors; the house we built in the playground, precursor to the one we’ll have in the countryside when we’re rich and grown; Barbie movies, American Girl dolls and Avril Lavigne on your pink iPod; dance skits and birthday parties and

you.

(is it too late to say sorry for writing this?)

Here’s the thing: when people ask me how I know–

(when you ask)

–I’ll think of her, hair bright as acorns in the sun; the one after, soft and hard-edged; the one who pierced my ears in the bathroom two hours before prom, beautiful and dangerous.

But those are the ones that come after, after I learn to soften without obliterating completely, to switch from Elizabeths to Elijahs, Ashleys to Aarons. That wasn’t something I’d mastered yet when I sat on your floor, wrapped in borrowed blankets and waiting stares, and offered you him instead.

And I still won’t tell you – when I sit on your couch and drink cheap wine, listen to you bitch about dating, watch you swipe on eyeliner sharp as knives, take photos of you by murals downtown, and judge your Tinder dates over supermarket sushi.

The truth is, you’re my best friend.

And if there was ever any other –

Some things are better left unspoken.

there’s paint on the corner of the faded green couch

and I am fine.

broken fingernails dig into too-soft palms

unmarked by the goals of my spirit

a promise,

a new beginning.

when I reach for my phone, it doesn’t buzz

I look anyway, just to see

a collection of faces; marked by dots

red and purple squares in a neat row

unopened.

empty promises weigh like my mother’s best earrings,

tearing down my mind like an earlobe;

my feet stumble beneath me

when I try to stand

paint-flecked toes tangling in denim and cotton –

my shackles are soft,

unbreakable.

lists the length of my palms

reach out across my desk

(I have long fingers

and my handwriting is small)

your name tastes sour on my lips,

so sweet on the tip of my tongue.

your words, as always, marked

a little green dot

unread.

I tell you it’s handled

I’m meeting <del>her him</del> tomorrow

my bedroom floor is empty, swept clean

the paperwork was in last week

and I am fine.

Tuesday, 11:08 pm

It looks like there’s a weather delay. I’m sorry, honey, we really wante

the mask I wear matches the paint on my walls

the tips of my toes

trust me, it’s prettier than the <del>truth</del> that lies behind.

It doesn’t start with the bus card, of course, but when you tell it later that’s how you’ll remember it.

It starts with a girl in bright pink lipstick, bright-painted murals on the walls of an abandoned mall, and a really good latte. It comes together in between, a series of moments strung together by the kind of half-developed hysterical euphoria you could only call the thrill of exploration; it forms in the breathy sounds of a world you’re just beginning to understand, bubbling bright on the tip of your tongue. You feel your world take shape in the shy smile of a street food vendor, a new formation built by the hands of a two-year-old on the bus – he teaches you how to say the word “square.”

The lights of the city are soft and warm where they trickle through dirt-streaked windows, washing over your clothes, your hands where they lay folded on your lap. For an instant, you feel yourself change – your whiteness is gone, painted away by the very place that marks you as a foreigner. To your right, a child sings along to something on the radio, a song you remember. The music is cheerful if you don’t know what it means.

You’re scared.

You have to remind yourself of this, even as you sit alone on a bus to nowhere, feeling the force of a billion lives crowd you from the outside in. It’s almost midnight, and the city is alive, so forcibly real you can almost feel its pulse. This life is so close, but so entirely not your own – when neon lights paint across your hands, you half expect to see it shift beneath your skin.

There’s a strangeness to your presence here, the way the cobbles beneath your feet rise to swallow you into the night, even as your very flesh repels. You feel yourself start to fade into life here, a guilty sort of happiness growing like vines in the cracked pieces of your heart –

(But at the same time, you see the way they look at you, the confines of your body a physical barrier to where you end and their world begins. It traps you, holds you tight in a way you’ve never known before; when you try to speak the language, your own skin clenches too tight, choking the words in your throat.)

The word for foreigner has the same roots as the word for outer, outside, a linguistic technicality to explain what you already know to be true. At the same time, wind and rain whip at your body like shackles, the city that rejects you laying a claim on your very soul.

You don’t miss the mountains. You miss being able to use them as a reference point, a fixed singularity among spires of concrete and steel. Now you’re a stranger in a foreign country, and you don’t know which way is west.

The song ends, cutting out with a screech of static like a war cry. The bus trundles on.

Out a dirt-streaked window, you think you can see the stars.