alexa n'est pas ici

In thirty days or so, I’ll leave France and it’s all I’ve been able to think about this weekend. This is my routine for the next month: I’ll unpeel an onion and tinker with the hot plates. I’ll cook another box of pasta and heat the sauce on a silver pan. I’ll listen to new music by an old artist. My mind steps back to two years ago. I find myself living in a new language in an old body. I wonder: Am I still the same scared girl who stepped off that Paris-bound airplane? I was shaking and splintering with fear when I met the soft-faced woman who would open her home to me that year. She doesn’t know that I collapsed on the bed on the floor as soon as she shut the door.

It follows that my skin was flushed to my boyfriend’s first touch. I am glad that I found him, that the next plane I boarded was bound for his childhood world, that I now get to inhabit that space, and that they are now my family, too. I think that I am lucky that a lot of my dreams habitually come true. I think I need to learn another new language, another scribbled set of codes, another ring of keys.

I don’t know how, but all of that misplaced shivering stopped this winter. I do a lot less fainting. I stay inside and it makes me happy, in the quietest way that I have ever known to be possible.

I think I used to think too much, but maybe I don’t do it enough, now.

Thinking backward makes it harder for me to go forward. It’s easier to say “I forget” than to delve into all of the sharp, shimmering ways that I remember. Dreams and songs bring it all back, in lightning bolts, at such frightening speed. When I remember, it’s in multicolor. When I remember, I could cry. It happens at the drop of a hat, or a stone. Remember the stone? Natasha’s long fingers dropped it into my flat hand, the hems of our dresses skimming the blades above our green home. I had it around my neck as I looked down at the new continent. I thought it looked perfect. And now I’ve lost it, or left it in my bedroom.

My mom replaced my mattress, the one that carried me through my teenage years. Thinking backward again: It’s the one that propped up my shoulders as I flicked some ash out of the window, daring someone to care. It’s the one that I soaked with tears, over boys, tests, and my physical self. It had so many uses: hideout, cradle, camouflage. It had so many stains, so much cat fur, so much DNA. One big imprint of my changing body. I wonder if it wouldn’t be so bad if it just got all torn up, someplace far away.

Meanwhile, I feel like a human punching bag over here. So far away from my best friend and my family. They tell me my brother is sad like I used to be. (They’re great at spinning stories about my mental health and stability.) I have always wanted to hug people and instead I have spent my life pushing them. Not away, exactly, just toward a specific edge. And pulling them. I make plans to fix all of my relationships when I get home. I don’t know how to extend my arms any longer than this. They are exhausted, but only metaphorically.

Home. It exists in flashes. Some so loud and others with their volumes muted.