Girl

In the beginning, I listened to my father’s old records.
there are layers of trumpets, emitting a blanket of buzzes and blares, underneath the gentle trill and flow of piano accompanied by the delicate drone of cellos, and it feels like slipping on a silk dress.
In my mind I created champagne glasses and long cigarettes, dangling from the fingers of swingers and glamour girls. In my mind I would dance in the arms of suited suitors, in the dim of hazy jazz clubs, or under the glow of streetlamps on cobblestone.
sometimes it snows, and I remember the way snow looked, all smooth and glistening like a clean tablecloth. Now I just close my eyes and rub them a bit, until the white flecks of light caught behind my eyelids appear as snowflakes or stars. I miss stars the most of all.
I remember a painting called by Magritte that was so beautiful it made me cry, so beautiful that I ingrained the image into the nooks and crannies and crevices of my mind. I remember the first time I saw The Lovers, I thought that surely that was what it felt like to be in love, and I want to feel that again. That was the last time I remember anything so riveting, so poignant, so rattling, so bright.

I want someone to kiss me through darkness, not to look into my eyes, my voids.


Boy

I could hear my mother’s sobs on the other side of the wall every night before I went to sleep. At first it was because I didn’t speak until I was six, and then it was because my dad moved into a younger woman’s house. I remember a few months when she was happy again, and we sometimes ate dinner outside on the patio, under the sky. We caught stars and kept them in jars, studied their palpitations until they faded, until they died. We mapped and coordinated our way through galaxies and documented our observations, plotted our voyages through milky ways.
Then her face grew long and solemn again, and she became thin like a telescope, and it was because I never made eye contact, and sometimes I spoke real loud in the grocery store, and I couldn’t stop fidgeting, even when doctors told me to please sit on my hands.
whenever I heard her crying, I would shut my eyes as tight as I could and try and remember the sky and my mother’s smile. Those were the two things I loved most in the world, and both of them were unattainable.