Summer
Now, the summers hasten in without warning, descending as gently as the sinner’s confession. The days ache with a heady fullness that spin her back into the graves of memory. Breathless June fever paints these moments so strikingly, so exquisitely she wonders if thoughts can shatter. Remember the searing blue of the sky and how the air itself was flaming? This is the plea she hears when she is finally alone. Badminton in the courtyard. the sweetness of missing. The earth opens as if in grief; the elm asks, when will you come back? When will we return?
Mornings, the shadows fill to brimming and her thoughts so softly empty. Here is an upturned bowl for you, where your hands meet the fullness of the world. She is before the wilted mirror again, watching vitality pour from the cavernous wound of her lips. A million neurons for this weight, for a tube of white paint on the cave wall. Name it all, they say. So this, they have named sanity.
What is a body, she asks herself, but all that you have forsaken? Only the throat knows the pain of swallowing. Only the hands have held this blade. What is a body but all the ways you have chosen to forget?
Sometimes the memories come to her with the red break of epiphanies. Sometimes — a dip in the air when the temperature turns, stunned by what it must hold. Or a voice that flays itself so delicately, carving skinned petals into bloom. And she sees dirty blue walls and a ping-pong table and the decomposing metal skeleton that regurgitated meals. Her name printed across a slip on the tray. Underneath it: no knives.
Or when they were towed outside into the same roaring sun that now walks its sullen fingers across her clavicle. Twice a day, with the diligence of bodies all hastening toward the dirt. Afternoons on the verge of shattering, when her throat wrung itself into a net to catch her shame. The boy who traced infinities under the basketball hoop ushered back into the glass stare of those lights. Flood us, they say. Or say the space their bodies leave behind, which is not so different.
What she remembers most is the time, how it folded the way poems curl into flame. How she begged it to recognize her, how she suffocated to its shadow. How she lives now shuddering in its lungs. Upturned. Inhale.
And the simmering day they brought her back, awash now with indolent delirium. She sees a pair of small feet pass under her, a cleaved hand reach outward, trembling. Here is the room that devours her, that carries nights flooded with vertigo and hollowness. Here is a screen flare, a single red pin like a blood drop. Three weeks since she has been gone. Inhale.
Crisis Text Line
I called an ambulance. I hope you’re getting help.
I’m terminating the conversation.
The black aftermath mirrors the remains of her face.
Over her, the summer sweeps in like a mourning. The dust gathers like a film of tears.
Cindy is a student in British Columbia, Canada.