Excerpt: Reflections

I'm pretty sure I don't know what you're talking about when you look at me with wide eyes, tell me you love me only when you are staring beyond me. My pockets are full of tiny stones, but there are so many they are heavier than I am. I carry them in buckets down from the mountain, carry them in my minuscule fists, wish I had longer fingers so I didn't have to walk back and forth, back and forth, treading paths where there used to be nothing but poison ivy, waiting to run its cool tongue across my bare legs. You don't remember that. I am not even sure you existed yet. I was pulling kites along the ground behind me, praying for wind. My fingers never touched each other back then. My hands never folded in on themselves. When miracles would happen, I shrugged it off as coincidence, dropped pennies from the tops of light houses and sighed heavily, relieved and disappointed, when they hit no one. Now there are holes so small they are almost invisible piercing the Earth, and I recall the first time there were needles shoved through my earlobes, and the second and third times. Everything after that is too blurry, as though my eyes were full of tears before blood could push its way out of me, gasping in the cool air, red as the berries you always told me not to eat.
I found that your eyes look like mine only in their shape. Like the moon or like pearls in the depths of oysters in the depths of the bay. I think about oysters, growing up alone because no one remembers explorers, like how no one remembers genocide, of people or oysters but never people who eat oysters and call it their world. Your pupils are full of light, and I think about how we define the absence of such as darkness when really there is no such thing. I develop photographs in an absence of light room and watch my father's face becoming clearer through chemicals, a foggy bath with a bottom that rests on his chest and in my breath on cold days when I can see myself breathe, like how I wear masks near you and watch my glasses fog, wish my eyes could see clearly on my own, wondering why you define clear the way you do anyway. Everything I see is distorted through glass. Everything I see bends when I touch it. Everything, including you.
It was hot when I arrived here. It was so hot we sat down for lunch on the grass outside, and you took your shirt off. It was the first time I'd met you; I couldn't remember your name. The hair in your armpits was glittering with droplets of sweat, reminding me of snowflakes and individuality, reminding me I didn't look like anybody else when you stared really closely, under a microscope, trying to figure me out before I melted.
My skin is burning from the inside. You sculpt my mind exploding, my face the moment before I feel the pain. I can't count my teeth again, can't remember the baby tooth in my lower gum that wants to cling to childhood. The dentist says it won't last forever. There's no bigger tooth beneath it trying to shove it somewhere else, but it wasn't made to last. Eventually it will chip away, dust in my mouth, telling me the air is more dry than it actually is. You remind me every day that the last part of me that is a child is already half gone. The false half is louder than my most important thoughts. I tell you this and you turn away, laughing. I can see my reflection in your front teeth. They're so white, I used to think they were snow.
When I have children, I plan to make plushy stuffed animal versions of their diseases when they're sick. When I have children, their beds will smell like cinnamon and I'll fold warmth into their dreams. When I have children, I will be jealous of their mud puddles and sandcastles. When I have children, I will know they're geniuses every time they write me a poem.
My mother told me people used to be surprised when someone died. During her childhood, the neighborhood kids would have scavenger hunts where they had to knock on the doors of strangers and ask for something. A dead battery, a flashlight, a key that doesn't open anything. The children would talk to strangers, be encouraged to do so. Now I look at young men warily, wonder why they whisper to each other when I walk by. I remember middle school, when I cried on your shoulder in an ally way because a woman neither of us had ever met told me I should be quieter in a library. It was the first time I'd spoken all week. I wanted to peel back my skin and remind myself I had bones, something solid holding me up, something with weight attracted to the Earth. I wanted to know I wouldn't float away.
In ninth grade, I asked them what would happen if I dug a hole all the way into the Earth and jumped into it. Without friction, I would speed up, faster and faster and faster, until I couldn't even see myself, until the walls of the Earth around me were spinning so quickly they looked blue. When I passed the core, I would gradually slow down, slower and slower until I could once again catch up to myself thinking. I would slow until I reached the surface on the other side of the Earth, then I would stop for just a moment before falling again. I often wonder if I would have enough time to leap to the side or grab onto the edge, or if I would just fall, faster, slower, stop, fall again, until just my body was falling over and over again. With friction, I would fall slightly less far every time. The hole where the light was coming from above or below me would become farther away, until I was in constant darkness. After some immeasurable amount of time, I would stop in the exact center of the Earth and become unable to move again. As there in, in fact, friction, I'd imagine this second event is much more likely. I don't know why someone would drill a hole all the way through the Earth, but I also can't comprehend why someone would slice off the tops of mountains and reach their oily fingers deep inside, pulling out ashes to wipe on their lips. I can see the mountains' tears. They remind me of my own, and I want to tell them the fingers will be gone eventually. I don't want them to know that you can feel them scraping at you, trying to peel away your insides, long after they're gone. I don't want them to know that what they take away will never grow back, or if it does it will be eons later when you can't remember what was taken from you in the first place. I want to tell them it stops hurting. I want to tell them, but I can't.
My thoughts are less heavy than I am. I used to have feathers growing from my bones, feathers that I could comb so they looked like hair. My mother told me that other children were jealous of me, that they liked me too much, and that's why they would tease me, write about me in bathroom stalls, tell the weird kid to ask me out, or not invite me to their birthday parties. I didn't believe her. I knew they didn't like me because I was ugly. I knew they didn't like me because my clothes were the ones my big sister wore the year before. What I didn't know is how much they saw of themselves when they looked at my. I was a clean handprint in the soot on the mirror. I was a puddle when you're not expecting it.
I used to think that the sun beams streaming down to me through clouds were ropes I could catch and climb on. I would imagine pulling myself up into the sky, feeling the warmth of the summer in my palms, parting clouds like lace curtains with my fingertips, urging myself through them. I used to think that mushrooms were stools. I would imagine the fairies that pranced on them at night. I believed in magic, in wishes coming true, in the stories adults told me. I would make wishes on dandelions. I wished that I was a mermaid and that I could fly. I thought the reason they didn't come true was that I was greedy. I knew, though, that every dandelion had at least a hundred dandelion fluffs and that a hundred dandelion fluffs could probably carry two wishes. What I didn't know was that the mystery lollipop flavor was really just all the extra bits of every flavor mixed together so no matter what you guessed you were wrong. What I didn't know was that people plant land mines to kill other people when they could plant forests instead. What I didn't know was that my parents wouldn't love each other forever and that my two best friends would move away and we'd forget each other eventually. I didn't know the weight of my words.
They tell me that no two snowflakes are alike, but I know that they taste the same. I've fallen into snowbanks on the side of the paths up our mountain. I've slipped while ice skating on my aunt's lake in Ohio, ended up on my back with snow falling on my face, onto my lips. I've rolled down the window on road trips to Grandpa's ski lodge, let the crystals melt on my arms and leave spots on my seat belt. I remember Mom driving through the long tunnel, how the radio would cut out into static that sounded like snow, how the sun would be so far away we'd realize that we were driving through the base of a mountain. The lights were yellow and came from above me so when I looked out the wind shield, all I saw was my reflection with a strange halo of polluted air mixing with the color of my hair. On one side of the tunnel, it was still fall, and when we came out the other side, Mom would always gasp, her breath turning to clouds, tell us to look at the snow. I'd roll up my window and watch the flakes running toward me, hopeful, then hitting the glass.
I read my poetry out loud because I feel like that makes it more real. I think my voice is alive sometimes. It sneaks up on me when I'm not expecting it. I imagine myself differently than the mirror tells me I am. I'm always surprised when I catch a glimpse at myself. Maybe I think I should have more wrinkles by now or maybe I think I should be made out of stone. I feel sometimes like I've been carved. My edges seem to sharp to be natural. My bones are too hard to be made of bone. I think I'm made of granite. You tell me I'm crazy while you eat pomegranates with the skin still on. You say you feel bad for peeling the skin off of anything as if it's not good enough, as if its sour taste is offensive when really it just reminds you of the poison you've poured into the world. The oceans have a salty aftertaste and the rain is too bland these days. The soil makes my throat too dry and I can't chew bark anymore; my teeth are forgetting what softness is. I read my poetry out loud and they ask what these noises are. I weave my tongue into baskets and use them to carry everyone else's words.
Today I learned that trees can grow through fences. They just reach out their limbs and refuse to stop growing. I think people are like this. I think they are like this until I listen to them speak. They tell me that they've given up.