bathtime

Coming at you with another draft part of my piece: this is the first thing I wrote for it, and it solidified the direction I wanted to go: kind of my jumping off point, if you will. I was trying to find the medium between narrative and journal storytelling, and this entry has a special place in my heart because I felt like it achieved something. Here it is for you!

January 14

Ran a bath. Water is a teal mint. I sink in slow, the whole room feels like it is separate from the rest of the house + the world. It’s just hot enough that I feel like my brain is melting. 

Rivers + Roads plays:         A year from now we’ll all be gone//

                                            all our friends will move away

                                            And they’re going to bed in places

                                            All our friends have gone away.

                                             

                                            Rivers + Roads

                                            Rivers + Roads

                                            Rivers till I reach you.

Mom knocked on the door, and the water was already cloudy. I remember I used to fantasize imagine getting in the water and sluffing my skin so hard that the water changed color. Mom offered to wash my back and I let her, feeling particularly small, thinking: we used to do this all the time. Not anymore. She sloughed off dead skin. I remember the last time we inhabited the same steamy space we had cried and yelled, but this time we stayed quiet. I watched her love me, roll up her sleeves, and mold me. I’m leaving for school again tomorrow, and I don’t want to start a new fight, or rather a new topic of conversation that creates a fight. I sat there, remembering when I thought getting out of this town, this house, would help me and change me for the better. It seems to be a little more complicated. Leaving basically everything in September and barely saying goodbye to anyone seemed like such a good idea, and I guess I wouldn’t go back on it, it just was so much more than I wanted it to be. 

I keep realizing, over and over, that I didn’t know that everything was so simple until it was too late. V and I would pick a VCR tape that I had at home and she would ask her mom for some money. We would bring empty backpacks and buy the grossest food; Twinkies, buttered popcorn, double stuff Oreos, whoppers. She chose Titanic almost every week, danced while we waited for the tape to rewind, took the food wrappers home because she knew I would get in trouble if mom found them in our trash.  

The last time we watched it, we didn’t make it through the first half before Leonardo DiCaprio’s swagger made us tired. We fell asleep together, tangled on the couch, while the ship sank.

Now, the shorthand we had developed over the years for snacks and movies, for our friendship dissipated bit by bit--now I don’t think we speak the same language anymore. She hasn’t responded to anything I sent her.

I blame her.

I miss her.

fuck. 

What about me reads like “nothing” to people? My whole break I’ve tried to decode why I don’t exist to the people I care about, but I can’t put any fingers on it. Being at home will always make me feel like I’m missing the chunk of myself that Violet used to fill up, but now, I can barely remember who we were together: it’s like a very vivid fever dream. Memories yell at me from the corners where we used to stand, the playgrounds we used to swing at late into the night, the movie theater where we would sneak cokes in, hidden in my cleavage. Now that I’m on my way back to school, I have the compulsion to believe that I belong there instead, but I don’t. I don’t belong anywhere. Had a hard time getting dressed today. I knew we had to move quickly because mom had an appointment that she had to get to, and she was annoyed about driving me anyway, but I took one look in the mirror and my brain skidded: nothing. I wasn’t working. Food late last night so this morning all I could do was stare at myself and pull at my skin and think you unwanted piece of shit. Put clothes on. Put clothes on and deal with it. What if someone I KNOW is in town and I look like THIS and they see me and their subconscious acknowledges that i’ve fallen way below normative standards. I have to look like a functioning human being. A sweatshirt will just acknowledge my chunkiness Just put some fucking clothes on. Mom kept asking if I was ready to go in that lofty voice she does when her anger is just under her skin, but I was stuck in the nowhere place between the mirror and me.