thoughts turned to ink turned to pixels

but of course, i can't leave. or rather, i cannot be left. during orientation week, they asked what home meant to each of us and i said the smell of tundra. how do you explain the smell of tundra, the feeling of it? the way you sink in and spring back and your legs burn with the effort, and clouds of spicy-sweet berry scent come pouring up from the lichens that contain no berries at all because i would never step on a blueberry plant? the rabbit on my chest is not a rabbit. it's a snowshoe hare.

contrast:

i have always refused to be afraid of change, and that won’t end now. i will not be afraid of the summer, or of moving across the country in august. i will take every single thing the world gives to me in the coming years, and i will ask for more.

but some part of me will stay seventeen. some part of me will stay sitting on the floor of someone else’s bedroom, sharing thai food out of a takeout container and playing guitar, one friend painting beside me, using an old magazine as a palette. some part of me will stay in that overheated, overcrowded box, as we looked at each other and realized that we had less than a year left of this, that in ten months we’d all be drifting away on the wind, to different schools, different countries, different lives. some part of me will dig his fingers into the carpet and live forever in the halcyon auburn, live forever in that bedroom, in the spaces between fingers, in the silence between chords.

short essay by emj @thoughts-into-ink

i am sitting in my red truck in the parking lot of my old high school. there is a girl in the passenger seat, and at this moment, i think i am in love with her. in a week or two, i will realize that she just likes the same music as me and has recently adopted a puppy. it’s a mistake anyone could make, really.

we are listening to a sad song. i know this one well, because it’s my phone that’s connected to my truck’s speakers. the girl beside me is playing dj, queuing up music from my spotify library. she is the only other person i have ever told my phone password. another piece of evidence that i’m falling in love—or perhaps, evidence that i no longer have anything to hide. secrets are for children, and i am not a child anymore.

i keep searching for skylights and sunroofs anywhere the light comes in from above.

i can hear the bath running in the next room. i can hear your voice, all of your voices, talking quietly, laughing, remembering the night we’ve just finished having. i’m lying in bed, and there’s still light coming through the window—it stays light out so late these days. summer is climbing out of the mountains and spreading out across the land.

there is love and kindness and the sun and chocolate milk.

(june prompt list by @julykings)

a bottle breaks against the back of the dumpster.

“not so hard,” i say. the sound hurts my ears: glass on metal, glass falling onto glass. it’s so loud it feels like you’re breaking them across my face. it’s hotter than hell, early august in an empty parking lot at midday, because you felt like breaking something and i didn’t want to volunteer for another round in the backyard. you never learned how to pull your punches, and i still have bruises from last week.

they’re my fault, mostly, for saying yes when you wanted to fight. we don’t wear gloves, you and me; that takes the whole point out of it. skin on skin, the only way we know how. boys will be boys, your dad says, and leaves ice packs in the freezer for when we’re done.

i don’t know how to ask you for a hug. i don’t know how to tell you i want to touch you gently sometimes, take naps together, put my arm around your shoulders, hold your hand, hug you when i leave, feel the warmth of our bodies in the sun without bleeding for it. but even if i knew how to ask, what would you say? when was the last time you held someone who wasn’t your mother?

hell, when was the last time you held her?

i’ve been thinking about that since this morning, when i got on twitter and saw that the last message had been sent with no reply. i remembered it, over and over, whenever i turned my phone on or looked out the window.

my battery is low and it’s getting dark, she said, before the winds of another planet drowned her out. it upset me. strange, maybe, certainly irrational, that i teared up every few hours thinking about a lump of metal on another planet, so far away that i can’t comprehend the distance, that i have no way to imagine or measure it. i’ve never spent much time before thinking about our tiny inventions, infinities away, rolling and moving and speaking back to us. i’ve only thought of her now that she’s done answering. but she’s a lump of metal that others spent fifteen years talking to, and god knows how many years before that dreaming with. and i care; whether it’s rational or not, whether it’s normal or not, i care. and i wish she had answered when we called last night.

she’s not really dead, of course. her solar panels may be covered, her instruments are silenced; she cannot sing to us from outer space, but someday, we will make it up there. we will find her, and perhaps she’ll be a metal shell and little else, worn down by martian winds and red, red sand, but we will find her. and, in the meantime, we will remember.

opportunity let us see beyond our comprehension. i look at photos of mars and i see the valley of fire in nevada, because try as i might, i can’t tell my brain that i’m seeing another planet. but opportunity did. opportunity saw, and heard, and spoke, and the things she told us live on, even as we try and fail and try again to understand them.