False appearances

That girl you saw earlier, the one whose smile shimmered, remember her? Her eyes were diamonds during the day. She cried that night. She sobbed until her tears hurt her cheeks, until her bones felt weaker than her heart. She never thought that would be possible. Her thighs were crimson with palm prints, she pressed until the pain felt numb, cursing the fat that only her eyes could see.

That boy you watched at lunchtime, the one with the scar on his left shoulder, remember? He told you his dog scratched him, an innocent offense. He tried to laugh it off. His eyes weren’t laughing. His dad gave him that scar. Beer breath, ash stained fingers, the knife flew through the air. The blood drops stained the carpet. His mother pretended it was red wine.

Remember the waiter who served you yesterday, the one who messed up your drink order a couple of times? His wife died a year ago. He works three jobs to be able to feed his children. After an hour or two of sleep, he leaves before the scent morning coffee lingers in the air. He never even sees his children.

You laughed when the old lady snapped at you earlier. You saw the look in her eyes and called her crazy. She put up her Christmas tree alone last year, ornaments damp from her tears. She spent Christmas morning crying that her husband hadn’t left her a present. He’d been dead for almost a decade. She’d still waited for him.

Your History teacher’s laugh used to ring through the classroom. She’d sing when she handed back essays, draw doodles on the sides of the board while you’d be working. She seemed full of life. Absolutely full of it. Until she didn’t have it anymore. It was 1:05pm on a Sunday when the neighbour heard the gunshot. Her laugh was never heard again.  

Nothing is ever the way that it seems. 

Look up

She watched the sunset through the screen of her phone. Brightened the colours with the click of a single button. The picture stayed, but she didn’t – didn’t stop to smell the looming rainclouds, taste the evening breeze. She never did.

I talked to him while he talked to someone else, thumbs dancing over the keyboard. Text tones became the background music of our one-way conversation. I told him about my parent’s divorce – he nodded. “Sounds good” he said.

He filmed his daughter’s graduation, admired her beauty through the view finder. He was fixing the zoom when she got her certificate. He missed the moment she threw her cap. Camera flashes became the crowd’s applause. Their hands were full.

She was walking, crossing the road at the time. The screen blinded her. She didn’t see the red man, didn’t catch the car. Screeches sounded, tires braking. Gasps stayed frozen in the air. She didn’t even look up. 

Life

I remember graduating high school. The awkward cap and flowing gown – everything I’d dreamt about, everything I’d waited for. That split second of relief washed through me, goose bumps attacked my skin. I’d done it. Now what? I moved on, went to university, constantly haunted by the idea of work. Dollar signs blurred my vision, the future overshadowing my present. I was dying for an apartment, a space in Manhattan, one of those buildings with winding fire escapes, just like the movies. Then I got it. I got the job, I got the money, I got the apartment. The bills came in and I paid them. Just like I should have. I never used the fire escape. Man proposed, divorce followed within a couple of years. That’s life. Stretch marks darkened with every month and, before I knew it, I was buying diapers and cribs and plastic toys that played the same song over and over again. The kids grew up and went their separate ways. Finally. I was dying to travel. A plane ticket and an empty bank account later, I’d made it to Australia – a seventy three year old woman with mismatched socks and hair greyer than the rocks I flung into the ocean. And only then did I begin to realise that, through it all, through all the expectations and waiting and dying for the next big thing, I’d forgotten everything in between. I’d forgotten to live.

The applause echoed. My blurred vision focused like the lens of my father’s camera. My mother cheered louder than her voice would let her. I blinked at my name printed onto the diploma, wrapped up with a red ribbon. I’d done it. And, with a single handshake, high school was over.

“So, what do you want to do now?” They asked.

“Live.” 

For Leah Daymon

Standards

They tell you to try your best. Work hard, they say, it’ll be enough. But what if your best doesn’t quite make the cut? What if you stay up all night, drowning in caffeine, eyes swollen, head on the verge of explosion, but when you sit down the next morning, you feel blank? Empty, like a canvas that has just been opened, like a candle with no more wax. You can’t remember the date Hitler came into power, or the main causes of the French Revolution. Then what? What if your best doesn’t “meet the standard”? The boy sitting next to you exceeds, as always. What does he do differently? Does his head hurt too? What happens when there are more red pen marks on the paper than words you have typed? And that “C” at the top, engraved into the page and circled, does it stand for clever or challenged? Teachers sew their eyebrows together, utter a quick “try harder next time” and vomit the next assignment, due next Tuesday, along with twelve others. What if your best doesn’t fit onto the two lines you are given, or the workspace that has specifically been marked out for you? They tell you to think “outside of the box” yet the box is printed right there on the page. Education fits into one box with countless possible labels. Just like the comments on yesterday’s essay - banal, unjust, lacking. What’s the issue, you ask? Education seems to “meet the standard”. And if that isn’t a problem, I don’t know what is.

Every body

Real men love curves, I repeated to myself as I ran my hands down the side of my body. They trembled, my fingers burning through my own skin. The sides of my hips were straighter than the edge of a picture frame, but I was not what you’d want to have on your mantelpiece. I was not something anybody could be proud of.

I didn’t even feel my eyes glaze over, didn’t notice the tears until they dotted the bathroom floor, forming puddles that would dry within minutes, but would leave a mark for hours, days even. I’d gotten used to it. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how numb my feet felt after pressing them together, my thighs wouldn’t touch.

I lifted up my faded grey shirt, ignoring the scars winding their way around my stomach. Bones poked out from underneath my paper white skin. That extra layer that other girls whined about, I longed for. I longed for the C cups and the figure-hugging dresses. Instead, I was stuck with a square like body and leggings that were baggy at the butt.

She’s so skinny, I’d hear them say, their eyebrows pulled together and the side of their lip lifted, as if it were held up by a string. They pointed too. It wasn’t a compliment. They weren’t admiring my stick legs or my too-small-for-children’s-size waist. Everything other girls thought they envied was everything I was. And everything I didn’t want to be. Real men love curves, right?

Gingerbread brownies

We’d made them together, my mother and I. We’d been making them for years. I’d wait for her to call me down one December morning, when the rest of the house was still dancing in their dreams. The frost would line the window edges and she’d have a candle lit in the kitchen. Vanilla – her favourite. She’d see the reindeer dot my pyjama bottoms and laugh because hers were the same.

“Which bowl should we use this year, Liv?” She asked as if I would change my mind. I never did.

“The red one.”

“With the hearts?”

“With the hearts.”

I didn’t watch the flour go in, or the way the eggs whisked together until they became one. I watched her face, her tongue peeking out from the left side of her mouth, her eyebrows slithering closer together with each new ingredient.

“Your turn.”

I felt the concentration etch its way onto my face as I added the ginger. I mimicked her as I always had – she was everything I’d ever wanted to be.

***

I woke up to the sound of sirens, red lights bouncing off my bedroom window. My skin hardened, my throat tightened. The house shook but my body was numb.

“I’ll be fine honey, it’s nothing. It’ll all be fine soon.” She’d lied about being sick. She’d lied. Every day I watched her face grow paler, watched her movements lag. Her songs stopped echoing through the house. She didn’t stir as fast anymore.

My own house was unfamiliar, the floor ice under my feet. Tears blurred my eyes but my ears heard everything. The footsteps, the cries, the distant sound of my mother’s heartbeat slowing down with every passing second.

“Liv, look after your sister.” Dad’s voice echoed inside of me, his footsteps a memory within seconds. That was it, no explanation, no reassurance; no “it’ll be okay”. Because it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t ever be okay again.

***

The brownies didn’t taste the same when I made them. 

Bully

 “Why do you bully?”

She’d been taught to stare like that. She’d copied another school counsellor’s stone like gaze, the ruler-measured line of her lips. I stared back at her in the same way. She was a statue – almost. Aside from our breaths, mine faster than hers; she moved her fingers, nails drumming against the table Slowly, as if the sounds were different and each needed to be heard. My mother did that.

She’d do it right before she opened her mouth. It was an introduction, a way of leading me into the insults, softening my fall. She’d feel my body tense, my skin harden. Idiot, liar, good for nothing. She’d pace around the kitchen and drum her nails on the knives as if they were rose petals. Her pupils were bullets and I was not immortal. Her yells pierced my ears – they never became familiar. Worthless, pointless. They hurt. They stung like injections at a doctor’s office, when the needle doesn’t hurt as much as the nurse’s lies. My mother’s shouts wouldn’t crack glass, but shatter it until the pieces resembled nothing other than disappointment – what I’d become to her. I regret you.

I hear snippets of her in my voice. The insults I hand out are mirror reflections of her, likes replaying tapes of my evenings.

“Well?” The counsellor’s robotic voice became a melody, more comforting than any I’d ever known.

“It’s the only thing I know how to do.”