As if I can still feel it, syrupy and tickling and sweet, my most forefront memory of you is sharing mangos, juice dripping down my chin.
I can see under my eyelids such soft colors –
Late spring’s apple blossom petals whirling slowly, lightly tinged pink and white.
Fruity, clear smells and the warmest, dappled sunlight.
I can see your short scuffy nail beds and browned knuckles with a small black paring knife peeling the skin off a perfectly ripe mango in a memory of me visiting your home. I don’t remember how many summers I had with you. My memory of organized time isn’t great. Only senses, feelings, and photorealistic glimpses of whatever my kid-brain decided to keep.
I was little, I know that much. Little in the way that I didn’t really talk, but I absorbed. I absorbed so much so that there were these great influences you left that I didn’t recognize til I was well into adulthood, probably somewhere around the age you were when I knew you. I was little, and soft, and so, so curious, and in love with you, obviously, because when I siphon through my memories I feel myself asking my mother every single day if I could walk the few houses over that it took to get to you, play in your plush, flowered yard full of bees and dragonflies and little green caterpillars. She let me. Every time.
If I close my eyes tighter I can stencil out a floorplan of your home with pinpoint accuracy, but only the places I was allowed – the front yard, the driveway, the porch, the kitchen, the garden – the geometric yet delicate white lattice fence consumed by blueish morning glories that separated your sidewalk of stones from everything else establishing itself first in a sketch, then it blooms and swivels in my head, I let it burst with its colors and its form and I walk through it just like I’m there again on my little legs. In my head it is a fairy tale house and those kinds were my favorite. But I think it was actually just a normal house. That’s just how you both made it feel.
There’s Pam, and there’s Lisa.
It couldn’t ever be Lisa and Pam. There’s a cadence that names can have in pairs (or more, but mostly pairs) and it’s always been Pam and Lisa, not dictated by order of importance, but just in sound. Just in mouthfeel. Pam and Lisa. Pam and Lisa with their dogs, Pam and Lisa with their drippy little mangoes, Pam and Lisa with their behemoth aloe plants and cluttered gardening tools and gentle, thick laughter that rang deeply in my ears. Pam and Lisa, with their wicker baskets gifted with strange, foreign movies that I never would have found on my own and which crafted a curious and intrinsic part of who I am today. Pam and Lisa, being a very specific image of what lesbians can be, without me knowing until way later. Pam and Lisa, being a very specific image of what love can be, without me knowing until way later.
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