Anamnesis

after ravi mangla

bianca layog

This was before she chased you around the girls’ middle school bathroom with soap soaked in her fingers, before that dog pissed in the practice room, before that kid you looked up to got caught smoking weed on camera, before you learned how many Tide Pods to put in a laundry load, before you got someone a bag of ice for them to chew on in an effort to get over her nicotine addiction, before that same friend offered you fifty bucks to take a hit, before you pretended to go to the bathroom but didn’t really, before you ate apples every day for a year, before you stopped eating apples, before you played poker with your friends every day in Shanghai for a month, before your classmates started eating salads and nothing else, before you could sing along to a Broadway musical soundtrack all the way through, before you sat in the guest bathroom in your own house and cried while having the sink tap turned all the way, before your dog stopped hating you, before your favorite cousin drunk called you in the middle of the day, before your mother broke your curtains, before you caught your brother waltzing into the house at 2 am after a late night out through the invasive cameras that your dad loves, before ten people got expelled your freshman year of high school, before people started dying from vape burns, before your friend drunk called you at the end of freshman year to sob about his ex-girlfriend, before he started getting crossed every weekend, before you learned what crossed meant, before you visited California and learned how awful it was when people smoked with the car windows all the way up and how this was only fun if you were one of the people smoking, which you weren’t, because this was before you said yes to everything people offered you, before your doorknobs stopped working, before you stopped texting your mother every day, before your father started emailing you your credit card bills, before you found out that you had a cat allergy, before your brother forgot about your birthday, this was before all that, when you were sitting in your childhood bedroom with your father, him halfway out the door, popping back to tell you, “Remember, champ, birds of the same feather flock together.”

Bianca Layog is a senior at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her favorite Mitski song is "A Burning Hill." She owns 17 winter hats and is from Manila, Philippines.