under construction!

i told everyone who would listen that i’ve seen you surface triumphant from the pool water thousands, thousands of times. best friend, ‘fly-swimmer, i’ve seen you shake the water from your hair like it was nothing.

i always swore i was one of god’s outcasts  and would never be caught dead in a church,  but that night i knelt in the hospital chapel,  a penance of hardwood pews, and begged  for whatever entity to reach down and push your soul back into your body where it belonged.

and i swear i’ll go to my grave with this guilt

that i left you there, outside the house,  smoke curling around your ears and a smile that means i’m not all right 

that i got to you too late, and you were sleeping in the quarry with the cold water licking the base of your skull and i pulled your dead weight out of the water  and cracked your ribs to keep you alive

and later they’d say that i saved your life but it doesn’t feel like i saved anything when you were made for medals around your neck, born to hoist a trophy. i told you once,

“i don’t ever want to hurt anyone”

ok so here’s how it went. the bus driver tells us we have fifteen minutes. we shuffle out. all of us here. side of the road in the middle of nowhere. but i imagine houses in the distance. even the middle of nowhere is somebody’s neighborhood. the gas station is off white, defiant in the weeds. a moat of rainbow colored oil slicks this castle a shiny defense. the thin red line at the horizon makes it shine and shine.

i could have run, you know. with my backpack and my sneakers. i was born with a hitchhiker's thumb. i could have used it. but i didn’t. that should count for something.

what i do instead is i go inside the station. it’s somehow darker than outside. dull fluorescent beams. i’m feeling like the dead bugs caught in the fixture. i take a piss with my butt hovering over the seat. when i look in the grimy mirror it’s like looking at another person. my DNA is not my own. at the group home i forgot who i was. i suppose that was the point, right?

i use your emergency money to buy candy, the kind you never allowed me to eat. the girl at the counter has red hair. her eyes say fight but the set of her mouth says flight and it’s like i know her. the tension in her limbs. her instincts battling each other. her body a war zone in a red polo shirt. and i want to take her hands in mine. i want to tell her to take a smoke break, then i’d show her your emergency money and we’d run away together, make for the freeway, an ocean of stars to light our way. you would say i was being dramatic. but i want to save her, or be saved by her. maybe they’re the same thing. maybe unwanted girls recognize each other, like there’s something in our souls that’s the same. something slight. something yearning.

what i do instead is i ask her about the mountains. she says they show up all at once, like one minute the horizon’s flat, then, boom. i don’t believe her. then i tell her my name. i don’t know why. maybe i just want somebody to know it.

back on the bus, the sunrise bleeds through like a stain in the laundry. and then we come over the crest of a hill and i see them. the mountains. they split open the sky’s soft belly without mercy,  and black birds of prey pour from the wound. i am hurtling towards something that a few minutes ago, i couldn’t even guess the shape of. but now it’s real.

there are lilies at your funeral, blanched and limp. may came hot this year and rainy, but the day they lay you to rest the sun is out. the grass is greener than anything. i am sweating underneath ty’s jacket and stiff white shirt. i picked it out of his closet last night while he lay on the rug, and we both avoided thinking about our stoned bodies lying right here, all four of us, just last week. golda and ty and you and me. i resist the urge to get down on the floor and dig through the carpet fibers trying to find your leftovers: an eyelash, a whiff of your stale scent.