you liked to sit in sunbeams a lot, and imagined that they turned your brown eyes into something other than the color of the rug when your mother spilled red wine all over it and swore under her breath and then started to cry as if she had come in contact with the vast nothingness (listen, touch that once, you donât come back from it), you liked to sit your hands on top of other peopleâs and say that you were just playing anchor instead of shiptossed yourself (thatâs the thing about the water; her eyes were the same color) and not that you counted but there were exactly 106 small freckles like a clover patch covering the bridge of her lamb nose and crossing river down her cheekbones. people like that, you change for. people like that, with the small curl she had right by her widowâs peak, with her rabbit hair and downy eyelashes; like if people were tastes, sheâd be two things. sheâd be the morning after you decide to live again, sitting down and putting cheerios into your wide open mouth and crunching down on them and thinking: yesterday was not my last breakfast. sheâd also be the cake you make a year later on your own birthday and eat all by yourself, like swallowing isnât shameful anymore but rather an inhalation of joy. i mean she tasted like when you stop surviving and when you get on with living.
this is the first time i kissed a girl. or maybe itâs the first time i wanted to kiss a girl. or maybe itâs the first time a girl wanted to kiss me (debateable).
youâve kissed boys before, but boys arenât sunbeams. boys are sort of like the rice cakes that you see in the healthy section of most chain food stores and are 90 calories (not that youâre counting) and everybody whoâs anybody swears you should eat. like the pretty girls crunch their pretty teeth on boys, on their bodies, sharpen themselves into right angles (or wrong angels, depending on how bright the light is in that particular room) for. youâve tried both - angels and angles; boys and rice cakes. youâve tried shifting yourself like sand to fit inside the bottle, but never seemed to get a handle on the art of squeezing yourself into perfection (at least not like everyone else did) and while rice cakes and boys were just fine, your staple diet didnât quite connect the pages of your little weak heart together.
and girls. girls are those rock candies you used to get as a kid and shove down the back of your tongue where they hurt the most and made your ears fill with the sound of the bubbling ocean.
your father never forgave you for the burns she left on your lips, but when she trembled and turned sunbright with her palm warm against your cheek and leaned in and inhaled and pulled you tighter to her and brought you the clay beast into the kiln of her wanting; you sort of accepted that some things are worth scarring for.
she said, âiâm sorry,â her greenblue (when you were seven you lived by the beach and used to chase waves out as they lapped backwards towards the belly of their family and now when you sleep you still hear them laughing) wide eyes, mouth still redpink (yours is on fire and probably, you think suddenly, covered in the sheen of her slightly-gold-glitter lipgloss), âwas that your first kiss?â
itâs not. or it is. either way, from that moment onwards, a lot of things are suddenly, mysteriously answered. you forgive peter from back in the eighth grade when you found him with his tongue down jimmyâs throat (but seriously though, fuck jimmy, heâs just an asshole), you forgive you mother for the wrinkle of her nose when she says âbisexualâ, you forgive yourself for not being born of stone.
this is the story of a river, meeting the ocean. or maybe itâs the story of the lamb who came home. or maybe itâs the story of how you can put sunbeams in your eyes with just plain love alone. debateable.
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