i wrote letters to peter pan until i was ten and realized how similar my mom’s handwriting was to tinker bell

there was a boy named dallas in my kindergarten class. i cant remember his last name but it doesn’t matter because  i loved him. he smelled like those prepackaged mandarin oranges you can buy in bulk.

i would carry my love for dallas home every afternoon, in the curls of my baby hairs and the paper cuts on my knuckles. i would carry dallas everywhere with me, like he was pressed lilacs or baseball cards. I would walk home with my mother, hand in hand, her palms turned inward, hiding the scars on her wrists, and I would make sure to stop at the house on the corner, the little blue one with white trim, to stop for a fleeting second, just to watch his bus drive by.

dallas had dimples and wore crayola marker stains like canvas paint. I thought he was beautiful.

when i moved schools my mother stopped walking with me. i would trace the sidewalks by myself, the lines in the earth like the broken lifelines on my mother’s palms. I would purposely squish the cracks beneath my chubby toes. i was usually late.

…

i always imagined kissing would be sweet, delicate. hollow kissing, like dancing with bird bones. i always imagined the regular things like graduating top of the class and dancing at prom and praying before every meal were stained into the religion of my adolescence, not worn as a blanket I could shrug off at fifteen.  i think it’s strange how things change as time unfurls, the way the ferns are unfolding outside my bedroom window.

my new house wilts when it rains. my mother is always sleeping in the bath with the door open, the last time I went to check on he running water I saw the blood and the body and-

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i am the daughter of misfortune and dependency and it’s not complaining if it’s the truth.

I don’t talk about my father much because there isn’t much to say. i don’t want to be my mother but i am i am i am, and it hurts the way the leaving does but here is the pain that i felt when she left.

…

there are bodies inside of my body, there are lungs within lungs within lungs in my chest in my throat and i want them all to breathe at once, but each takes their turn while the others are choked down to my hips in pooling green ivy.

so much breathing. the in and out and i think about you a lot more than i should. i say that i shouldn’t not because it’s not nice to think but because i cannot explain the way i think when it’s about you.

i am having trouble calming my mind. the blood is green and sopping and thick like the sweater i have stitched on my body since seventh grade, and i am so tired.

i imagine all fairies drooped over their guest beds, quietly becoming their alcohol poisoning.

like tinker bell with tunnel vision. neverland fading in and out of view from tiny, blinking irises.

i believe it is fitting how my faith is dust.

Author: Katherine Westbrook

Kate. Too cool for school. View all posts by Katherine Westbrook