The Water Bodies

Aelin li

     There’s a rubbery scrape around our walk. The streets: a rushed stampede of tires. I pull you 

     (“Let’s go, Nevada!”) and we run until the neighborhood draws over. 

     We fall over in the park behind your yard, pant and wait for the world to focus. Eventually I point for you to see: the slow ripple of oak-branches above us. They wave and wave: dirt-castles, a tiara of grass, bottlecap princesses start to fall through the canopy. We smile and remember. 

     When we grow up, and you drag your perfect teachers’ praises home, I’ll be waiting here in this park. Carrying a bench outside and hosing every hole I find. I’ll make herbal soup and wait for you. 

     Come home to me, Nevada.

It’s hours before you come, and the edges of the day crumble and feel so forgettable. There’s a moment—many moments—where I want to go back to my cozy room. The soup I’ve made has long since cooled. But I wait here, it is the only way I won’t miss you coming home. 

     When I finally spot your silhouette drifting off the streets, my body fires from the woods and pulls you tight on top of me. We’ll wake up after a ceaseless day and wrap this moment inside ribbon. 

     Mom, your mom, she comes over when it starts to get dark, and weighs her words on the strings between us. I feel her lips start to push down, the whole system, there is so much space being pulled between us. 

     “Hey Six,” Mom says. “Nevada has to go study, is that alright? Sorry that we have to go.” 

     I put my nicest smile on when I turn to face her, because I know she’s not really asking for it to be okay. Our eyes meet and hers is hollow.

     “Yeah, that’s fine. Thanks for having me,” I reply.

     Nevada waves (“Nevada, let’s go”) and she limps away. After the screen on their back door closes, I hear echoes of her mother’s scolding. I find our small make-up mirror covered in dust, and feel my chestnut eyes prickle. When I finally fall asleep in the tree-house we built for us, it is flooded still in past paper projects that never worked out. 

     Two years later, when you bring back your last passing grade, I barely even recognize you. You are wearing black jeans, no gracing dress to be found. 

     The mahogany bench shivers under us, cold leaves fall and their touch washes you open—a skeleton. I wipe the frozen sadness off your face, try to breathe a coal alive inside your socket eyes. 

     “What happened??” I murmur, my hands cupped around your face. You shake, breaking down between us, and tuck yourself under the shadows by moonlight. 

     We’re at the park behind your yard, where the bench is now smashed upside-down. Lips split between the dirt path, I 

     cannot separate this picture from the moment when your mother tried to wrestle the collar back on. When you almost hung in the war trial. When she slammed bars onto the windows in your heart, because you defended your last laugh and sacrificed college. In an effort to reach you, I whispered,“Do you remember how it feels to bleed out?” 

     You were Nevada, the girl with the teething mother. You were so far away from me that the spaces between us made ecosystems. 

     But I once owned that space. And nurtured inside the space lilies. This park inside us. When you didn’t visit before they died, I made excuses. 

     Now, it almost became home to a bathtub replica of Antarctica. I had no reasons like you, but still both ended up here with the desire to dissolve our bodies.

Even ten degrees below freezing doesn’t purify you, not like alcohol does. All I became were sirens, the crackling of skin. Far off black whimperings that grew louder and would not stop. 

     You stayed in so many types of hospitals before I was finally allowed to visit you, didn’t expect. That you’d sunk the room into a grave of fish, that we’d have to hold onto each other to stay above vertical miles of water. 

     My jerking breaths struggled to draw the glacial melt away from us; your lungs deflate and are helpless. When you hesitate to hold me, I realize that somewhere the ropes in us have been broken. 

     Later, in a book I read to escape, I learn about the drowned. How their tired stumbling lends themselves: one stream to the lake-beds of Earth. 

     I’m pulling your water down around me, so impossible. But each breath I wrench, the minutes of life I steal back to us are declarations. 

     Alaska, my friend. 

     We’re at the park again, where I rock you slowly, pray that the shining comets will hear my prayer over yours: (Please. Let us memory-makers grow old together) but I feel like an undercurrent next to you. While your shuddering tears open this afternoon, and your brain wrests intestines out of the summer heat.

     I feel like this is my fault, that despite all my intentions, we are still both wishing different things. 

     My feelings break their ribs on a bed of rocks. It falls open, my chest muscles a stiff block. I can feel a rippling as you start to drown between my cradling teacup hands. 

     No. My fists tremble.

     My brain, the body I was given. I hug them until they burn. My younger sisters—our younger selves! I’m sorry that I almost let you down. I was so much. I promised you. Tell your older sisters to believe. That we care about each other still.

     Back at your house, I find you slicing pieces of your fingers off, buttering it across your 21st birthday cake. And later, in the middle of our sleep-over, the night decides to climb in through the windows and smash the bones inside your legs. 

     But you look at me and grab it. 

     We've escaped to the park, where drops a rope by the bench. Instead of a neck, I hung us a swing. 

     We stay there, long after the light drops out of the sky, the outlines of our bodies swaying together. I face you and start to recount. I want to break our plastered masks. 

     When the moon-shadows start seeping down, we unlatch, and I pull myself over—calm hand over hand, I drag my shadow to the ground. Hands in dirt, I look back, endlessly expectant with my eyes. But you are still, and unafraid. 

     I plead as we all watch you. The shadows. The trees. An atmosphere of bated breath. You roll your head back to an open neck, eyes closed with a singular lust to be consumed. 

     I’m choking,”Our park. Bottlecap soldiers. Swim… Skylines.” The shadows are eating at you, trying to steal parts of your body off and even as I want to move, there is no touching them. 

     We’re at the park, unbreathing. Can any ear hear it? You’re coughing. Coughing out the world that you once swallowed in your emptiness. Heaving poison from your throat. 

     I see the tiny lights in your eyes for a moment as they sink their way naturally back into the sky—a clouded sky. You’re reaching out to find me; I’m crying, and the shadows are searching for the poison, eating at it while you stomp out its guts. 

     You’re looking at me, with eyes that have seen shit, so much shit. You are not okay. 

     But we’re at the park. And for us, the words are tentatively preparing to be let free.