2015

And so, another New Year’s Eve came and went, sweet champagne kisses lingering on my lips. I didn’t make a resolution, not one. Not this year. I was tired of the two time gym sessions and vows to cut out the carbs. I didn’t want to be that girl anymore – the girl who sobbed through December, the girl with disappointment stained cheeks. I didn’t want to wake up at midday and have it dawn on me that every plan I’d made had failed. I was tired of being a failure.

I didn’t want to make plans.

I wanted to daydream my way through lazy Sunday mornings and feel the coffee spill through my veins. I wanted to drag blankets onto my balcony and watch the sun glow with endless new possibilities. I wanted to put my Christmas tree up in October and carve pumpkins in June. I wanted to eat a bag of cheesy crisps without guilt’s constant nags whispering in my ear. I wanted to buy a plane ticket and board the plane that same day, explore hidden gardens and hectic sidewalks you can’t plan for.

I wanted to fall in love and not think about the consequences. I wanted to stop thinking altogether and just do. I wanted to lose myself and find someone completely different, someone who more resembled what I wished I could be. I wanted to grab a microphone and sing about my sorrows, leaving them in the past where they’d be safe and could be forgotten. I wanted to smile for no goddamn reason. I wanted to drive on an open road and ignore all the traffic lights, feel the freedom stream through my hair. I wanted to meet someone new and get to know every single thing about them, drown in my own laughter at their words.

I didn’t want to imagine tomorrow, or the day after that. For once, I wanted to think about the present. This year, I wanted to let myself live.

You

Sing me your favourite songs. Whisper the words into my ear, but say only what you mean. When you catch me looking at myself in the mirror, pinching at the layers around my legs, just know that I try so hard to listen to the words you say. All those times you’ve called me beautiful. And, on those days when the raindrops on the glass match the tears on my cheeks, use your left forefinger to wipe them away and tell me things will be okay. Maybe if you say it enough times I’ll start to believe it.

And, do me a favour and save the I love you for a night when you feel like, if you don’t say it, your heart will catch on fire. Because when I fall, I fall hard and I fall fast. If you’re not ready to catch me, I will collapse and I will break. If ever seem distant, know that I’m trying to pull away because I’m a wave of regret and you are the strongest pull of the tide there’s ever been. Pull me into you.

I wish more than anything that I could be good enough for you. I tie chains around my body in a hope that I don’t cling too tight. In a hope that you won’t get tired of me. Even though I know you will. Everyone does eventually.

On those nights when I keep my lips pressed together and my eyes are hollow, drag me out of bed and show me what it feels like to live. We could run to the beach and feel the waves lick our toes, lie back on the sand and watch the stars twinkle like my eyes on the day when I realised that you made me feel a way I couldn’t control.

So, I did fall hard. And I did fall fast. And my eyes did twinkle like stars whenever I was around you. You taught me what it was like to feel full. You took my mind places it had never been before and I let you. Because, in the end I wanted it to be you.

11:17am

It was 11:17am when Grace started crying. We were in Math class, foreign functions painted over the pages. The pencil fell to the floor. The desk shook as she ran out.

“Go with her,” Miss Smith said. To me.

I found her in the bathroom, her reflection crimson in the mirror. Tear puddles dotted the floor. She looked at me and pressed her palms into her face, as if she were trying to shield the tears. She wanted to hide them, lock them away. She wouldn’t be able to. I’d tried.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. Her knees went first. She collapsed to the floor, gasped for air as if the walls were closing in on us. Her sobs echoed. I sat next to her. The auburn waves fell over her face, strands sticking to her sorrow stained cheeks. As she lifted her arm to move them away, I saw them. I saw the scars winding their way up her wrists. They were deep. Just like mine.

She looked up. “What’s wrong with me?”

A question I’d been asking myself for weeks. “How do you feel?” My words were breaths.

“Empty.” 

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.