'Scarlett' Chapters 2 - 4

Alrighty, folks. After much internal debate, decided to put a few pages of my newborn story here. Please no copying and pasting. Ack! Kind of scary sharing such a new idea, but it's going pretty well and want you guys to give me feedback, in the comments section please! Constructive criticism highly welcomed. Basically, the story revolves around Lani (18) and Scarlett (25), alternating perspectives, who grew up in the same town but never meet until the last chapters, after both having left their hometown to travel when a shooting devastates Lani's highschool. Lani struggles with the homophobia of her small town in these chapters, before she decides to leave home, where she lives with her psychotic stepbrother, Bryson. Scarlett is questioning everything about herself- from her relationship with Ben to her job to her sexuality. Being the beginning of the story, both characters haven't developed much. So grab a cuppa, read on, and let me know what you think!
xo

Lani

August 3rd

Red pricks on white skin

Blood red roses against the pallor of new snow

Snow White has been sleeping inside me for

Too long now

To retreat from this crimson bordered ivory coast

Contrast of harshness in the stark red lines

Against the virginity of untouched flesh

I always go far enough into the redness

For a sharp burst,

But never enough to let the whiteout win

      

     Control is a funny thing really. There are certain things in life that some people believe you have complete power over, but in reality, you are a slave to a brutal mix of fate and hormones. Brain chemicals, like an army working against your every will power. Things in your life like grades and jobs and friends you can decide on. But other things, like sexuality, you can’t.

     I knew I liked girls when I was fourteen. But I pushed those desires to the corner of my heart where daylight can’t reach. I feared for my own lusts, my own heartbeat. I felt wrong, dirty. Girls my age were supposed to like boys. And I did. I mean, I liked how they all liked me. I’m pretty enough, sexy some might say. I have the sunset golden skin and big brown eyes. I have the gloss-covered hair and the curves that swell like cresting waves. I liked how my boyfriends’ hands fit perfectly over them, protective, possessive. I liked how they wanted me, needed me. That gave me power.

     Control.

     But there came a time, last spring, that I couldn’t push my feelings into the background anymore. Her name was Laura. She had black hair and blue eyes and skin like blushing roses. Baby soft. We met in a cafe on the other side of town and spent a whole summer drenched in lust and dusted with love. We were blindly searching each other’s bodies for fulfillment, satiation. I needed her like a mother and she needed me like the ocean needed the shore.

     But like all intense, leaves-your-heart-throbbing summer romances, ours ended in a downpour of autumn tears this fall as the leaves tumbled to the ground around her onyx hair in a spill of gold and ruby. She left me to the harsh October winds without protection, robbed of comfort.

     

                              Scarlett

August 5th

                I roll over in the queen size bed, my arm wandering across Ben’s broad chest. I watch as the skin expands as he sighs, stretching his white tee shirt and raising my hand. I look at the creaseless-ness of his face; the smooth skin and long eyelashes. My hand inches towards his neck, and I kiss his shoulder. He rolls over and sits up in the dark. The alarm clock shows five o’clock in red letters. It’s too warm in here.

                “What’s wrong?” He turns to look at me, his torso still facing the wall. His eyes look annoyed, deprived of sleep.

                “What do you mean what’s wrong?” I’m confused by his worry.

                “Why did you wake me up?”

                “I didn’t mean to wake you. I just-“ I trail off, realizing that it is a lost cause. “Why don’t you reach out to me anymore, Ben? Why am I always doing the reaching?” His face is blank.

                “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He gets up and pads to the bathroom. I roll onto my back and stared at the wood-planked ceiling. Five years. My mother had always told me that five years would be the be all and end all of a relationship. That’s when the heart-wrenching desire fades to television watching and who’s going to turn off the bedroom light. I remember her saying, her eyes somewhere distant.

                No. My relationship with Ben is not going to dissolve, a mere victim of time and circumstance. What we have is too special, too rare. I searched long and hard for Ben and I’m not about to give him up now.

                He returns and slips beneath the covers. I look out the window at the pinkish light of dawn. Suddenly, the five o’clock morning looks more enticing than staying here in this too warm bed.

                I release myself from the warmth of the suffocating covers. Release my mostly naked, save for Ben’s oversized button down, skin from the entrapments of cotton and linen. Walk, feet pressing on hardwoods, to the window. Peek through the opening in the layered curtains, rose gold light meeting my tired eyes like espresso.

                In a flash of lightning, I am downstairs and out the door, dressed in white shorts and a loose camisole. My auburn hair falls in bed head, last-night curls, around my shoulders and my brown purse is slung across my right shoulder, cross-body.

                The cafe is mostly empty at this time of morning. There’s the odd workaholic in suit and tie, and collegiate with a paper due at nine, bags swelling under their eyes. The bll tinkles above my head and coffee machines whir behind the bar, the scent of roasting beans wafting to my nose. I step up to the counter, to be met by my favourite barista, Shelley.

                “Hey there, love, what can I get for you this morning?” Shelley asks in her usual fluorescent voice.

                “Um, I think I’ll have the vanilla cappuccino, please.”

                “Coming right up,” she moves behind the coffee machines and starts steaming milk and pumping syrup.  “How are you these days? Enjoying the summer break?”

                I pause before I answer,

                “Yeah. Yeah I am. I’m working part time at as a columnist for the Mitchell Times, so that keeps me busy. I go in Monday, Wednesday, Friday.” Today’s Tuesday, so Shelley looks at me with a hint of suspicion as to why I’m up so early. “I needed some air,” I feed her, and she nods.

                “So how are you and Benjamin doing?” She always addresses Ben by his full name. Guess that’s what happens in a small town like Mitchell.

                “Good. He’s good. We’re good.”

                The same suspicion etches in her eyes.

                “I’m glad to hear it, honey,” she says as she hands me the cappuccino, extra hot with extra foam.

Lani

August 7th

Pressure

Expand

Contract

Try to breathe beneath the weight of his secret

Transferred onto you by osmosis

Of deceit

Breathe in

Breathe out

Don’t think

Obey

     Bryson’s couch is prickly under the bareness of my thighs. I wriggle to find comfort in the hell hole of a living room, not much living going on here, but I only cause the red chafing to increase. I’m uncomfortable in the silk and mesh of the baby doll he pulled over my head.

     I take in my surroundings. I haven’t been in Bryson’s house since I was young, maybe eleven or twelve. I know his games, or tricks, I should say. I’ve been living without parental guidance for a while now, and things were never PG for me. At least then, my mom was still around to look for me. To send the cops bang bang banging on his front door. To pull me from his claws like a princess. Now I’m eighteen and there will be no one looking for me.

     I know the deal. I wear the lingerie, I paste the makeup on the dry skin of my face, hide the chapped lips with the richest red of lipsticks. I sit on this couch or that bed and I wait. I wait for him to bring in the men with wandering hands and devious eyes and unfulfilled lives. I lie back and wait until I am covered with their release and then I clean.

     But I will never be clean.

     I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the dresser. My dark brown hair is spiked in its usual pixie cut, and my eyes are traced with kohl. My lips are red like snow white and I have the skin to match. Three dollar bronzer could never hide the pallor of ghosts behind my skin.

     I hear a knock on the door. I whip around, ready to face the next suitor. But all I see is Bryson, alone. When he opens the front door of the small rancher he brings in the night air, and it swirls around me. I can picture the stars if I close my eyes long enough. Bryson is my step brother. He trades a place to sleep for whatever he wants. Unfair, but such is life.

     “Hey honey.”

     “Bryson.” My tone is colder than ice water, trickling over the smirk on his lips.

     “What’s with the face? No johns tonight, thought you would be happy. I had a cancellation,” He brings out his diary, all professionalism, “so we get to discuss The Plan.”

     I hadn’t thought about The Plan since I was fourteen. That’s when he went all quiet and didn’t tell me anything, not even me.

“Now,” He chuckles to himself, a horrible cackle of a chuckle that chills me to my bones. “Now, we take it to a whole new level. We will have the whole world seized by terror. And this is the key; this is the key, honey.”

     “Stop calling me honey,” my voice was whisper soft, like footsteps on damp pine needles.

     “What was that? Honey, you are going to be The One. It has to be you. It will shock them more than the act itself! A girl, a girl with small bones and a small stature. A girl! This will be the best plot the world has ever seen! A little girl, that’s you honey, staring at them down the barrel of a gun!” He grabbed the skin of my bicep and pulled me into his bedroom. The tears pricked through the barrier of my mascaraed eyelashes and poured rivers of blackness down my cheeks. He flipped on the dirty light switch and illuminated the horribleness. Newspaper clippings and hand-drawn sketches adorned the black walls, covering them like morbid wallpaper from floor to ceiling. My breath was coming in short spurts, just enough oxygen so that my head would not explode. There were pictures of me, from a two-year-old up until now. He had drawn handguns and stuck them onto my hands in every single picture.

     “I am not a murderer!” I screamed into the room.

     “Oh honey, you will be. You will be. Just you wait.”

Scarlett

August 9^th

            This summer seems to be going on forever.

            I mean, at the end of June, I couldn’t wait for long, hot days without any screaming children. Without any books to read or quizzes to grade or parents to meet.

            But I’ve realized that my teenage years of hot, sticky summers are long behind me. And now I’m left with a boring job behind a grey desk with a flashing cursor begging me to write boring articles. And when I come home, I’m met by a man who has tricked me into a five year relationship of the same week on repeat.

            Okay, I guess he didn’t trick me into it. But all the same, I resent him for it.

            When I was sixteen or seventeen, I used to dream about being in my twenties. All the things I would do, all the people I would meet, all the life experience I would gain. Instead I caved beneath the pressures of my high school teachers, my friends, and my parents, and I settled. Instead of taking my full scholarship to an arts school in San Francisco for painting, I chose the monotony and comfort of becoming a teacher in a good school. I would have a solid job for as long as I wanted, with good pay and good benefits. And I told myself that I would be fulfilled, helping kids. But really, I wished every single night that I was still painting, that I had held on to that ultimate dream of being able to make a living on a paintbrush and canvas.

            And with the monotony of my job came the security of Ben. The strong comfort of his embrace and the sureness of his deep brown eyes.

            We were on the path to having it all, and we talked openly of having kids. Of getting a dog and going for Sunday walks, watching a movie with the family on Friday nights, and going for brunch.

            So why, when I saw that unmistakable plus symbol on the pregnancy test a year ago today, did I suddenly feel a knot tightening in the pit of my stomach? Why did I start trembling with panic, my hands shaking and tears welling up in my eyes? Why, instead of rushing to tell Ben, did I rush to Planned Parenthood and wash the embryo right from my uterus?

            I remember that day like the sterile bed was only hours ago beneath my shaking body. I drove to the clinic, no tears, all business, without even a thought of calling Ben. Okay, maybe the thought raced through my mind once or twice. But every fiber of me screamed not to tell him. So I didn’t. When I got to the centre, it was mostly empty. Pro-lifers in this town have been itching to shut down the dilapidated clinic for years now. A single pasty grey haired lady sat behind the front desk, issuing me a form and assigning me to a cold plastic chair. The inhabitants of the clinic consisted of a young girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, nervous as a butterfly. There was also a couple, around twenty-five or so. The last party was a girl, around sixteen or seventeen, with layers of cheap eyeliner surrounding her large brown eyes. A suspicious could of blue edged its way towards her temple. Her short hair curled timidly around her ears.

            My name was called and I was ushered into a procedure room, where I was given a gown and told to lie back.

            I waited, staring at a poster on the wall of the digestive system. I remembered my high school teacher discussing the various purposes of the liver and I remembered how I wanted to throw my textbook at her all year long. I remembered the chiseled football player who I had a huge crush on for a few months, until I found out he was dating a complete airhead cheerleader.

            That’s what was running through my mind. I wasn’t thinking of the tiny life forming inside of me, of the way Ben’s face would inevitably crumble when I told him months later, of what getting rid of this baby revealed of our relationship.

            I should have known we were doomed right from that day.

            But instead I pushed, I tried to make our love work because ‘love isn’t found, it’s made.’

Lani

August 11^th

     

I don't wear rainbows on bare skin to spite you

To threaten your community, your wife, your children

I don't fight for my rights against you

Against God, against trust, against family

I don't love someone in order to offend you

To scare you, to threaten you

I wear rainbows because sometimes the darkness is so black

So opaque from the way you stole my rights from me

That I need something bright, something hopeful

I need something to show me that one day,

One day our love might be equal

“Hey Lani,” Matt Grant’s voice floated toward me across the warm wind currents of the Mitchell Pier. I was seated on a wooden bench, my arm resting on the round metal armrest. A journal was propped on my crossed knee, and I was peacefully staring into the dark blue abyss that was the ocean. I loved watching the ocean, of being so close to something so infinite, so endless, with so much potential, so much freedom.

     I jumped. Snapped my leather journal shut.

     “God, Matt, you scared me.” I looked into the eyes of the tall football player that, if I was so inclined, I would probably get lost in. Matt never seemed to catch the drift, or maybe he just thought that I needed the ‘right kind of guy’ to put me straight. Or so to speak.

     He winked. God, I hated that wink.

     “Enjoying the sunshine?” His voice was heavy with insistence.

     “Yeah, I was.” Emphasis on the ‘was’.

     “Well, how’d ya like to join the guys for a smoke? I know a really cool place near the trees where some real entertainment goes on later tonight.” The way he said ‘entertainment’ made my skin crawl. Seriously, the guy’s had one too many concussions.

     “Matt, honey, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what I need to tell you. You know I don’t roll that way, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be rolling with you.” I couldn’t resist adding that last bit on there. The way his eyes drooped almost made me regret it. Almost. Because sure enough, they quickly turned from grey to red-hot. He put up that muscle-head wall and looked at me with eyes of stone, of steel.

     “God, you Lesbos are so fucking unbelievable. You’re such bitch teases, making us watch you all girl-on-girl. Seriously. You’re fucking lucky I invited you to join us. Normal girls would kill for that position. Fuck you, Lani.” With that, he grabbed my journal and hurled it off the edge of the pier. He stormed away, back to his buddies in the trees.

     That’s the common attitude around here. There’s no such thing as just loving someone of the same sex. If you’re a girl, you’re a dangerously sexual tease who just needs to find the right man. If you’re a guy, you’re a pussy who needs to man up and grow some balls. Either way, there’s something broken in you. And the citizens of this godforsaken town have taken it into their own hands to fix you.

     I look over the edge; don’t see my journal anywhere near the surface. Fucking idiot, I had just written some really good stuff in there. Oh well. I grab my sweater and leave the bench, not looking behind me as the sun recedes below our horizon.

     I’m walking up the grey pavement of the beach parking lot, my mind on my lost words and my heart lodged in a strange place between indignation and embarrassment, when I see her. Laura, walking along Main Street, her black hair cascading down her back, over her white chambray shirt, as she laughs and curls her hand around a blonde girl’s. Wait. She’s with a blonde girl. I walk toward them without meaning to; the girl has long light blonde hair and huge blue eyes that seem to hold galaxies. It is a stark contrast to my dark brown pixie, and suddenly I want to hide my plain green eyes away from the blistering sunlight.

     “Lani?” I look up. Crap, I must have walked right up to them. Subtle.

     “Oh, Laura, hi,” I stammer, looking up into her matching green eyes, the same as mine, like I used to look into them for countless days and not nearly enough unremembered nights.

     “This is Elizabeth,” She gestures to Blondie, their hands never breaking contact.

     “Call me Lizzie,” Blondie speaks.

     “Hey. Um, I was just-“

     “How are you?” Laura looks into my eyes with concern, but that store-bought kind of concern you save for the mentally ill and strangers, that more concerned-for-yourself kind of concern. What happened to us?

     “I’m good.” I start to turn away.

     “No, really, how are you,” she grabs my wrist, pulls me toward her. Lets go of Blondie’s hand. And it’s last summer again. I look up at her and betray the tiniest bit of truth before pulling away. But not fast enough. Her eyes catch the ugliness protruding from my sleeve, angry red lines proving that I’m far from okay.

     “Lani...” Her voice trails off, because I am no longer hers. No longer hers to protect, hers to keep safe, hers to harbour from the storm. I am my own, and she is Lizzie’s. Blondie makes that clear as she regains hold of Laura’s hand, and pulls her slightly away, retracing their steps. Retracing their steps away from me.

    

                                Scarlett

August 13^th

            I could leave him.

            Pack up my bags; leave my key on the counter, maybe a note for good measure. I could walk out of his life and maybe just find what I’m looking for, maybe just find a heart that completes mine like they said they do in the movies.

            I remember when I was little and my parents were in love. I remember the stolen kitchen kisses when I wasn’t looking. I remember hands placed on knees while driving on long road trips with no drama, I remember love notes and small smiles and surprise chocolate bars.

            But I also remember the sunlight giving way for thunder clouds, the greyness seeping into our lives and driving a wedge between the two most important people in my life. I also remember screeching tires and separate homes and anger.

            And then I remember the final, resigned friendship that they both agreed to, for my sake. I remember how they said barely a word to each other in passing, how they barely acknowledged the other’s existence.

            I didn’t want Ben and I to become like that, living out our life because marriage vows tied us to it

I could quit my job, drive far away, not looking back as my tires screeched out of the driveway, like my dad’s had done so many years ago.

I think the driveway still wears tire marks like scars to remind us of that night.

A Goodbye

I'm sorry
I'm sorry my heart was not
Forged from the same tendons as yours
You deserve better
I'm sorry your flowers will droop
Beneath the weight of my betrayal
Under every time I lied
When I said that I loved you
I'm sorry
You deserve someone who will love you
With their whole heart, in its imperfect entirety
Who will dance through downpours with you
Who will hold you like you hold them
Like you held me
I'm sorry I was not meant for you
But you were meant for someone
And they will find their way to you
I'm sorry

Dreams

I think it's because when we were children
Lips smeared with chocolate cake
And sidewalk chalk
We used to dream about these experiences fervently
As if the more time we spent
Playing them out behind our
Closed eyelids like silent movies
The more reachable they became
And now we've grown up and
We're on the threshold of actually living them
It's hard to accept that with real beauty come real flaws
And it takes courage
To relinquish the perfect dreams of childhood
And to accept life in all its imperfections
But when we do
We open ourselves to the possibility
Of living out that silent movie
In full colour
And with the most beautiful music
Playing behind our sidewalk chalk silhouettes

And Though

I feel your heart

Beat in my hands

And though my soul should despise my head

And though the rain echoes your eyes

And though in all facets of life

I should clasp you tight

I find my mind trespasses my hands

And my lips no longer craving yours

How could love grow to shrivel and die

Carcass easily blown aside

I must be scarred with such ugly knolls

To not love someone like you

But what is love with no desire?

What is heat

Without a fire?

Stella

          Stella May Spelling was a pearl-wearing, flapper-dress loving, Charleston-dancing, all-around all-american twenties girl. Her mother was a seamstress, who, having failed fashion school, resorted to sewing other people’s big ideas. She hated it. Her father was an investment banker, who wore scary round spectacles and was constantly polishing them. Stella never liked her father, and neither did Stella’s mother, so the two of them spent hours in her mother’s room at her vanity, brushing each other’s hair and daydreaming about possible other fathers of Stella.

            Stella’s greatest fear in life was to be like her parents. Her mother was hollow and heart-broken, always waiting for some superman to sweep her away, to rescue her from her eternal life of washing dishes until her hands dissolved into the grimy soap and doing laundry until she ironed herself into a shrivelled up corpse. Her father was bored and dull and only talked algebraically. Stella was a dancer, and she danced through everything. She danced like the world was ending and she danced with everything that she had. Her skin was smooth and fair, like ivory piano keys that seemed to be draped like cake fondant over her delicate bones and dance-conditioned muscles, which were just strong enough to support her as she span and jumped and kicked but never got in the way of her doll-like appearance.

            John was the first and only boy that Stella ever loved. They met at a dinner party on Christmas eve, 1923. Stella was seventeen, and John was a twenty-year-old from New York, sweeping into her hometown of Boston with such an air of life experience that Stella was immediately under his spell.

“I’m John,” He murmured in his deep, throaty voice.

“John what?” Stella asked, her eyes holding questions.

“Just John. John from New York City.” Her heart leaped. A mysterious, older, handsome New Yorker? Her night was made.

“Stella,” She held out her hand to him, her pearl bracelets clinking. She thrust her champagne glass at an already loaded waiter and he took her hand, pulling her onto the dance floor, his hand around her tiny waist.

During their final dance, as the music swelled and their hearts beat faster, he lifted her above his head by her hips, and she arched her back as she span around, dizzied by champagne and twinkling fairy lights. When her satin-clad feet touched back down on the ground, she breathed in deep, and their eyes met. The kiss that followed was unlike any that Stella had experienced before. It was giving, respectful, but eluding and inviting. Stella, her dignity to protect, pulled away. John’s hand brushed her cheek and traced her arm, dropping something in her hand.

As his back retreated into the crowd, Stella looked at the paper in her palm. Her eyes read the ink, unbelieving. She read it and re-read it and re-read it, digesting, spitting out the information, and digesting it again. She moved to follow him but her breath caught in her chest, and she stopped.

Stella moved out from under the huge marquee that the party was being held in. June air filled her lungs and she stared at the moon that was rising over the blue lake and illuminating the dark sky. Stars twinkled at her and made her tears shine like rounded diamonds as they wet her cheeks. She brushed at them out of reflex, not really caring who saw them.

She looked up at the sky. Her eyes found the moon, and the face that was projected on it like a film projector. It was his, in all its perfection. His hair even moved in the breeze and as she raised a hand towards it, he winked. She climbed the railing overlooking the lake, her shoes abandoned, her feet feeling the cold metal and the rain from last night. She leaped off that railing like an angel in flight and she didn’t look down, she believed she was flying as her body was suspended, and she felt herself rising up, past the clouds and the atmosphere. The sky darkened as she entered the vast emptiness that was space and her fear was quieted when she neared the moon, her hands intertwining with his and her body pressed against his, for he was a part of the moon and she melted into him, their figures eternally embraced on the surface of the grey moon rock.

Back on the ground, her best friend, Emma, stooped to pick up a piece of paper she had found near the railing overlooking the lake. Her eyes read it, confused, and then her eyes found the lifeless silhouette of a body floating on the lake. The figure was wearing the dress that Stella had been wearing moments at ago at the party, Emma was sure of it. She screamed as the realization hit her, as she came to know that Stella was floating, dead, on the lake below, some couple hundred meters of a fall.

She looked again at the note, tears that weren’t Emma’s smearing the ink.

I was only an illusion.

I Can't Remember

I can’t remember the details. Remember. A word with too many meanings and too much pain attached to its skeleton frame. Remembering is a butterfly word with its wings snapped off because remembering is static. Remembering is paralyzing, and remembering is too much of a bad thing. No, I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember the suffocating silence, his blinding white sterile heart, wiped clean with Comet and dried under a volcano. I don’t want to remember the way he looked at me, his dark eyes a reflection of a million storms. No, I don’t want to remember. I think I’ll stick to watching Gossip Girl re-runs and darting my eyes between the pages of the glossy magazine I’m holding.

I glance down at my nails, frozen, grasping the magazine like a life raft. Bitten like a summer strawberry, my nails are a reflection of my personality, a symbol in my life, as my English teacher would say. This fleeting thought transports me to that day last November. The sky was a mottled array of grey and white hues, like an artist had gone completely insane, Picasso-insane, and decided to paint the sky a depressing mix of sad and sadder. I remember noticing that sky when I woke up. I remember glancing down at the indentation in my bed where he had lain. I remember feeling the cold hardwood floor under my bicep when I woke up to that dark sky.

I walked slowly to my mirror, I was a deer walking on a thin sheet of ice and what I was about to see could startle me and cause the ice to break. Snap. Like my heart. So slowly, I placed myself, eyes closed, in front of my mirror, like I do every night after he’s been here. I position my hands over my eyes. One by one, I lifted my fingertips from their places just above my eyebrows, where I felt it, throbbing. I let them slowly fall from my face, and I stared at myself in the mirror, once again entranced and horrified by what I saw. There it was, clear as a summer day. Anyone would be able to recognize what it meant. But apparently no one I knew was anyone. The purple, red, and black crescent shape bordered my right eye like some careless child’s colouring. The pen hadn’t stayed in the lines, and the colours all blurred together. The bruise was the sky outside- mottled, dark, and sad. Sad and sadder. I remember painting over the unsightly painting on my face with my worn-down concealer stick. I remember the pain of its pressure, how it felt good. How it took my mind off what I had to face today. Him. I remember being half-satisfied at my work, at my careful blending of creams and powders and lotions to make the big, fat, ugly blotch go even half away. I remember not looking at anybody when I walked downstairs, up the street, and into school. I remember finally lifting my eyes from the cheap linoleum floor when I sat down at my desk in my Grade 11 English class. I remember staring at you right in your bright blue eyes when you handed me my homework back from last week. I remember willing you to notice the blue behind the beige, I remember staring at you so intently, hoping that you would finally notice. But all you said when you saw me staring at you was “Good writing, Amber,” as you set down my essay with a big plop on my desk. I remember staring at the big, fat A in red marker on the first page. I remember wanting to scream and throw it at you because it reminded me of dried blood. I remember.

But that is all I remember, all I ever will remember, I think, as I sit here on this couch in front of my flat screen TV, reading a glossy magazine and slowly picking the mascara off my eyelashes, like picking the wings off the butterfly word, remembering. I sit here, sipping six dollar green tea out of a twenty dollar mug, my new bruise throbbing with an almost gentle persistence under my newly-replaced thirty dollar concealer and powder from the Sephora across the street. Of course it has to be the thirty dollar kind, the kind that should say: “Hides perfectly all bruises, marks, and scars from abusive boyfriends” on the label in pink, flowing script. Of course my mom or the lady behind the counter at Sephora should notice that I am buying so much makeup all the time. I haven’t had more than one monthly pimple since I was thirteen. What would I need concealer for, other than for hiding battle scars?

But my mom is too busy click clacking in her two inch black patent leather pumps down the oncology ward of the hospital, fighting back her own tears as she dries the tears on my little brother’s dying cheeks. Yes, she’s too busy with her corporate job and her cancer-poisoned child to notice me, her straight-A daughter with an affinity for abuse. I’m just a six-o’clock on her weekly agenda, a ‘hi, honey, how are you,’ met with the same lie every day, every single day. ‘I’m fine.’

Kyle is what I deserve. When he’s not inflicting pain he’s apologizing profusely, begging on his knees that I will stay. He makes the cut then transforms into the band-aid covering it; he causes my tears then dries them frantically. Some people cut, starve, binge, purge or drink. But that’s a punishment that they inflict on themselves, something they control. They get to play god, they get to decide when they’re guilty. Kyle decides that for me. It’s what I repeat to myself over and over and over and over again until it’s so engrained in my head that I believe every word of it. That this is what I deserve.

At night, I wait. Every night I wait for him to knock on my window. I wait for him to lower himself into my bed after I slide the window pane silently open. I wait for the numbness to take over as he begins doing what he has done for the last three years of my life. Fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, all spent in terror of his wrath. Imagine how much money I could have saved if I didn’t have to buy a new thirty dollar concealer every month for three years of my life. But everything else, I block out.

No, I don’t want to remember. Remembering is a butterfly word with its wings snapped off because remembering is static. Remembering is paralyzing, and if I don’t have to remember, I don’t want to. I’d rather lie under this canopy of mottled gray sky, remembering the reasons why I shouldn’t remember.

Remember

Sometimes the sadness curls up

Right inside that hollow part of me

You know the one

Maybe it’s been there all along or maybe we cultivated it

Somewhere along the way with sidewalk chalk and crushed butterflies

All I know is I am gasping here

All I know is sometimes, all the lights turn off and the glow in the dark stars reveal everything I had tried to forget everything

Everything that plays and skips in my mind like the vinyl in the record player

All the sadness

All those crushed butterflies and tragic moments and sad faces and taught eye skin

Clenched for tears

Tight lipped delivery of bad news, every rainy day every spilled coffee

Every failure every time I have ever been broken

Sometimes

Everything piles up like a library of blackness and it’s hard

It’s hard to remember the sun, the stars, the smiles pulling at the corners of my lips

The blush, the butterflies, the beauty of her eyes

Sometimes it’s easy to forget

Sometimes all I can see is the way you looked at me, the way you knew and I didn’t, the way you were poised to tell me

The way I came home to find you heaped, curled on the sofa

The way every inch of life was drained from your eyes

The way you surrendered to loss like flame to breath

The way the sorrow washed over us, disbelief dripping from my eyes sometimes

Sometimes that sorrow flies back to me and it’s hard to remember

The feel of her skin, the feeling of being alive

The electricity that means I’m still fighting

Sometimes I forget

But all I need from you is to hold me until I remember

Help me remember

Breathe

And maybe when this storm has passed

When ships have sailed and long left my stormy seas

Maybe when the ghost of you

Has been washed and rinsed from my memory

Maybe when I’m far away

Over seas and mountains and tall tall trees

Maybe once you learn to breathe

You won’t need to steal the air from me

Blush

When the very first cry of spring’s newborn tears

Can be heard above the bellowing of the city’s fears

After all was frozen in impeccable frost

And warmth of breath on skin was lost

When sunlight infiltrates the dark

And each bird’s singing resonates in your heart

When the ground sighs the greatest relief

Of pressure once too much to release

When eyes are opened to flower’s first blush

I’ll wait for you, so hush, love, hush

What August Was Like For Us

There is an almost physical clenching in my heart as I try to write this. As I struggle to put us on paper, to make the reader understand what August was like for us. I could start at the beginning, but where is that? The memory of you is an undecipherable, tangled mess of old wedding photographs from when we were six and seven, to a mess of pictures from my last trip to your town.

I remember a smile was engrained into your face for almost the entire night. I remember running up to the ticket booth and paying my £2 for a ride. I remember you, with your vibrant green eyes that reflected unseeable storms and I remember the ripple of your muscles. I remember stealing glances at you as we span and swung and fair lights glistened everywhere. The taste of cotton candy is still fresh in my mouth, dissolving and bursting like the fireworks when we kissed. I remember sitting on the bench on the pier, you unwrapping a lollipop for me and me staring at you intently as you illustrated your scars and told me your stories. The raised white snakes of new skin covered your knuckles (from fighting), your muscled forearms (from fighting a different kind of battle), and your finger traced your shirt where, underneath, I would find the worst of it. And in that moment I knew I loved you more than every star in the sky because some force was pushing us together, something that made my heart scream when I had to leave you. Something that made my heart cry like the rain reflecting on the pavement. In that moment I felt the same fear as jumping off a cliff because you were now rooted in the deepest corners of my heart and I knew I cared about you in a way that I have never felt before. I remember the darkness between us in your living room, when you told me you loved me and I was swept away into a land where I didn’t ever have to leave you and you could hold me like that forever. I remember you.

I think that memory is the best place to start, because that was the initiating force that caused all the other memories; clutching on to your necklace as I sped to London on the train, watching you sleep on the webcam, hearing you promise me that you’ll always be there. We experience loss in many forms, and losing you was one of the worst. Distance is a force that has an immeasurable power to break incredible bonds, because I never thought that the memory of us on the pier would be shattered, the fissures running like spider web scars over its fading surface, and I’m reaching, futile, trying to hold on to it.

Above All

Above all

You must remember to never attempt the squishing of your perfect bones into the mold of ‘normal’

For everything that is unique about your multifaceted surface is what makes you beautiful

Every scar, raised slightly higher than average skin

Every quirk, every time you move your fingers in anothers because that’s just the way you like it

Every step you take, avoiding misshapen cracks

All of these things add up to the brightness in your eyes, the realness of you

Above all

You must remember that you are pursuing something challenging

Not the easy way out you

Are chasing uniqueness and that’s what makes life beautiful

You are holding firm and standing your ground in the chaos of people rushing around you

Sometimes

One of them stops

Asks you why you’re standing there, writing poetry and travelling the world and you tell them

It is because there is so much I need to see

There is so much I need to experience

I want to soak up life like your dirty dishtowel and I want to relish in it

I want to feel all of her hills and valleys and I want to explore the subtlest of her scars

I need to live

Before I am ready to determine the rest of my life

In Praise of Talking

                 It was any other summer. The crickets could barely be heard above the roar of the silent night, broken only by the strength of the sprinkler or the laughter of a child. It was hot that summer, hotter than usual. The days stretched out like the reach of an eagle’s feathers and nights were sticky and suffocating. It was any other summer; we were settled in our new house and sidewalk chalk and sand decorated our pockets. Sure, it was any other summer.

                Other than the weight, undetectable at times, pressing persistently like a mother’s hand on my chest. It was always there, like the stars that became invisible in the sunlight, but sometimes there was more pressure than others. Sometimes, you could hear the faint crack of my bones under the paperweight that did not permit the flight of my happiness. It’s hard to pinpoint when and where and how that weight was placed under my skin, but it’s safe to say that fourteen-year-old summer was the catalyst to its thunder.

                At first I thought it was hormones. Then I was lazy. Then I had no direction. After a while, I was ungrateful. I was immature. I was over dramatic. I was a walking head case. The unspoken judgement that followed me like a dust cloud was thick like the tears coating my voice. I was confused, I didn’t understand why summer was supposed to be the best time of the year but it was my worst.

                I had a best friend that summer, let’s call her Katy. She seemed to understand the weight, the harmful words that involuntarily flooded from my lips. She had been dealing with my demons for longer than I, and her experienced tongue and hand taught me how to evade the darkness. Or so I thought. In reality, Katy pushed me down the rabbit hole farther than Alice herself and I was so lost in that night time that I thought I had found daylight.

                Self-injury is a precarious road to be traveling a hundred miles an hour on. For us, at least, it was a way to take into our own hands the pain that seemed to be inflicted on us by some higher, celestial power. I don’t know, to this day, what our goal was. It carried many labels: an addiction, a form of control, a cry for help, a suicidal tendency. No, it wasn’t suicidal, it was simply a form of self-medication. No, it wasn’t self-medication, it was a suicidal tendency.

                It was when, towards the autumn, that my counselor said,

"I'll see you next week," to which I replied

"Maybe."

But she grabbed me and she made me promise that she would see me next week.

And she did.

And that's what it was, a weekly, sometimes daily, act of getting up, of making it through the day, of making it through the night.

                It is terrifyingly sad that that’s what it took to bring to light the darkness that had been suffocating me for quite some time. It was completely unnecessary, and could have been avoided. Thankfully, it forced me to seek professional help and now I have learned to deal with my demons in healthier ways. But I have made it my mission to ensure that no one has to suffer through what Katy and I suffered through to get help. No one has to teeter on the edge of the bridge to learn how to talk themselves down. No one has to end it all, just in order to breathe again, somewhere where the weight can be lifted, somewhere where happiness can be real.

"Hope is real. Help is real. Stop the bleeding."

"Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été." - Albert Camus

Spirit Day

There’s a bursting inside me sourced from the supernova of

Your eyes and I know I can’t push you away any longer you

Persist

Permit

Me to accept myself even though I have hushed it away for the past seventeen years

And by now I am bursting

I am bursting

I am bursting like the bubbles of truth that bubble and swell up inside of me

Swell with the lies and the truths and the secrets

Because I am only half of myself when I am not with you and that has to mean something

It has to mean something more than a

Girl crush girl friend I know that I love you

But we collide and we melt and we burst and we break

And we are at different stages different steps

Of our lives just trying blindly to put the pieces back together

That we lost when we were so small and I am trying to tell you

To tell you all I am trying

To find my voice to find my hands

To find the part of me that i lost somewhere along the way but I am saying it now

In this jumble of words that is spewing from my fingertips I am telling you now

I am telling you now

I am not inhumane I am not a freak I am not

I am not what goes bump under your bed I am the same

But I am different

I have imperfections that make me perfect but if loving a girl is an imperfection

Then I have lost all faith in humanity and I am glad

I am glad that I live in a community that makes me unafraid to say this

To get this out to set this free

I am thankful

That even though some of you might hate me for this the majority still love me

Like you

And you

And you

You have all helped me to push these words out on this day

On this Spirit Day when people come out of their figurative closets and into the sunlight

I tilt my face up to the rays

Because I am unafraid

I am whole now

I have found the parts of me that were lost in the night and

I found them in the stars of your eyes

I have spoken

And I hope you will speak

Rest in Paradise

I am struck by the way you have exited this world with less than a whisper, less than

A trace of a goodbye

I am struck by how your eyes have closed to infinite sleep

Without ever having been met by mine

I know the tears escaping from my trembling eyes are laced with

Unmade memories

But know that your light will guide me on

Through times both rough and beautiful

Know that these arms will never feel your warmth

But they will not be barren either

Because your spirit will always fill them up

With everlasting youth and laughter

Never leave my side, not ever

We will walk through this darkness

And emerge together

I wish I could have held you tight

And whispered in your ear

That though you may not live tonight

We know you will be forever near

Ugliness

It’s raining. I don’t know this because I can see the millions of falling droplets, because I can’t. I can feel the streams of fresh water on my face, pouring and relentless. I turn my face to what must be the sky and let my skin be soaked. I am clean.

                I’m an insomniac, but I might as well be sleeping. My eyes have been eternally closed by his hands and his poison. Put me to sleep where I can’t ever dream. It’s lonely here, in this world of so much blackness and nothing pretty to look at to relieve tired eyes. I’m dripping by this time, the streams running through my hair and between the fibres of my thin cotton shirt. I can’t tell you what colour the sky is, but it must be the grey of the sadness that sucks the life out of you, that elicits tears that leave you winded. Empty. I am empty.

                I’m in her office. She has old-penny coloured hair, I can tell by the way her voice is ripped and frayed around the edges. She asks me why I don’t sleep. I ask her if she’s ever been powerless. She asks me why I can’t see. I ask her what chlorine gas does to those fine veins and retina filaments and fibres. She closes her eyes to breathe, digesting. I can tell by the too-long silence that fills the room. It’s toxic. She asks me if I’ve tried sleeping pills. I tell her I’m afraid to dream. I don’t want to see the horrifying scene that is in my rapid eye movement. She asks if it hurt. What? I lie, pretending not to know what her invisible words are alluding to. The room smells like roses and Kleenex. A tear pricks the pink, naked skin of my tear duct. It’s caught by an eyelash, diminished. Silence fills the room again like the coffee she sips. I tell her I still feel rough palms on delicate shoulder skin. I tell her that that bruised for weeks. Then she said it. What about your eyes? I focus on the smell of her coffee; imagine that her eyes are as brown as the beans. They’re probably looking at me right now; focused, unshaken, seeing. I tell her that chlorine gas isn’t acidic but it might as well be acid rain for the way it burned my sight away.

Two of the Same

Your lips, bright cherry stained

Tiny, flawless, butterfly-like

Anticipating

I imagine they taste

Like imagination

Your hands, baby breath soft

And lonely, I can feel in my bones that

They are reaching

Just like mine have reached

Your hair curls in milk chocolate ribbons

Touching the outline of your face

Just the edges

Because the strands,

They too

Are paralyzed by your beauty

The skin of your being

Melted over you

Dusted with iridescent memories

The lingering flutter of butterfly wings

And your eyes

Their impeccable blue-ness absolutely

Electrifying

Heart-stuttering

They whisper to me in languages

Neither one of us speaks

Saying everything your lips

Tremble to release

I imagine you taste like summer

Like sticky sand and exploding watermelon

Like sleeping on couches and the inside of a bonfire-melted

Marshmallow

Like holding hands to Death Cab

Like dancing in the middle of the street

Like spiky emerald grass marking the backs of our legs

I imagine you are mine and I feel something rustle

Deep in the bluest depths of my heart

But you drift from my hands as my fingers

Accidentally

Brush yours

Or was that just my imagination?

The place next to me

Has been kept warm for you

By boys who I can’t even write here

Their names entirely undeserving of your light

This place next to me is empty now

The sheets slightly rumpled

The quilt overturned

But maybe one day

When courage isn’t imaginary

I’ll have you here beside me

I don’t know if you’ve ever tested these waters

If your hands are any more experienced than mine

I don’t know of your religion

If it keeps you in shackles away from me

Because our lips are both red

Our hands the same size

We are

Two of the same

You and I

And everyone knows

Opposites attract like magnets

So why does our same-ness

Awaken me?

The Old Woman

She is frayed

Ripped around the edges, worn like an

Overcoat

She sits on the stone, shadowed,

The crevices running, eroding fissures, echoing

The sunken trenches in her papery skin

She stares

Hollow eyes, emptied

Drained like the rainwater that runs like tiny feet over the rock’s surface

Running from the unseeable

Her hands

Long, spiny fingers alike to the vines that curl around her hollow legs

Her fingernails slicing the air, razor sharp

Tracing the untouchable parts of my heart

Her hands lie, open like bloomed flowers

Blistered palms upturned to the greying sky

A sort of praying, begging

Less like an offering and more like

A stealing

Trying to reap the energy straight from the very sun

Prolong her life here,

On this rocky precipice

Twenty-six months since she has had a life to feed on

Since she has filled her veins with the soul of another

She sighs

Waiting for me to fall back into her

Frigid palms, her fingers

Itching

For the way my neck used to be exposed to her grasp

For the way my forearms were open to those fingernails,

Veins at the ready,

On-call life-support

Twenty-six months since she has slept on my insomnia

Since she has robbed me of everything that kept me going

She was so close

So very close

To the end, to becoming queen of my universe

Ruler of my lands

If she had just pushed a little bit harder,

Maybe,

She thinks,

Maybe she could have had this girl’s life, the ultimate satisfaction,

Eternal existence

The old woman sits on the stone wall

Cold, hard granite pressing on her hollow bones

She stares at me with empty eyes

Her hands upturned to my mercy

Sometimes she touches me,

Deep into the night

Just brushing my skin, reminding me that she is there

But she is crumbling, her bones dissipating

Into a dust storm around her

And if I look closely

I can see those hollow eyes

Closing, slowly closing

The Cherry Blossom Tree

It’s raining pink blossoms outside like the underbelly of your tongue

Like the lips that part for your laughter

It’s raining pink confetti outside my window

Like the palms of your hands, like your cheeks just centimetres from mine

The cherry blossom tree cries short gasps of beauty

Descending rains of clarity over my shaking body

It’s raining cherry petals

They’re falling through the April air like

The way your eyelashes echo your hair

It’s pouring

A storm of delicateness

Chaos in beauty

Serenity in confusion

You are the cherry blossom tree

Come rain down on me

To Write Love on Her Arms

Indigo cotton rests on skin once scarred by the blade

Renee danced with

Renee Yohe, the catalyst to Jamie Tworkowski in the founding of

An organization that would bring hope to thousands of girls and boys

Around the globe

What started as a grassroots organization in Florida will be known as the

Lifeboat for thousands of people in countries all over the world

I wear my To Write Love on Her Arms shirt as a survival badge

Because I am a survivor

I wear my To Write Love on Her Arms shirt for community, to let people know

Hey, I’ve been there too

I wear my To Write Love on Her Arms shirt for everyone who didn’t win my battle,

For everyone who’s still fighting for breath every second of every day,

And for everyone who has fought in this war

I wear this shirt so maybe

When I’m buying apples

When I’m ordering my daily coffee fix

When I’m wandering down Vancouver streets

When I’m on the bus beside a girl whose tears don’t even try to be hidden

Maybe that grocery store clerk knows of this pain

Maybe he will find hope in the way my strong arms were once weak

Maybe the barista is a relative of Renee

Maybe that girl who I pass on the street

And a smile tugs at the corners of her lips

Maybe she is a survivor too

And maybe that girl on the bus

Could be a survivor once the tears have passed

We are all a community

A mass of people fighting for oxygen

We all have our battles and we all wear our scars

And we all need speech, communication to survive this

Maximalist

Her hair is a dream catcher of frozen memories, concealed grade nine trauma covered by a mess of external toughness like a thousand hit-men covering her impenetrable skin. She looks at me with a fiery glint in her eyes and I know that she isn’t hearing a word of what I’m saying, that the words are just running through her taper-plugged ears like the vodka she swirls around her throat. The baby pink skin of her esophagus is scratched and raw from countless cigarettes, the marks echoing on her forearms where she danced with a sharp monster a few too many times. I chased away my monsters but she is forced to surrender to hers, caught up in a riot of demons pummeling her into the sidewalk. Her eyes are marbles, reflecting the storms and tears and dramatic nights of screaming and crying and praying that she won’t leave me here to chase away all these monsters by myself. I tell myself that she was the one to drag me into this, that it was against my will, but then again, didn’t I ask for this? I let myself into her world with the key that she handed to me and I never looked back at the reality that I was leaving behind because I loved her more than any real world. I couldn’t let her go through this alone. Her lips are frost-bitten strawberries, whispering sugary sweet lies as I look out the window and pretend to believe her. She looks at me with fear in her eyes, fear for the delicate strand of whisper-fine hair that is her life, the fragile, iridescent beauty that she is slowly crushing in her fist, a lullaby suicide. She is walking the fine line between sanity and losing it and she isn’t doing a great job. She keeps tipping over the edge and begging me to catch her every time she scares herself. I’m always there to pick up her shattered pieces. I’m always there to glue her back together and tell her that it will all be okay. But as she pops ecstasy with her Prozac and washes them both down with her trusted 2/6 of Vodka, I find it harder and harder to expel from my lips the lies that she craves so desperately. What happens when you’re gone? What happens when the memory of you in my mind is just a memory, fading into the blackness of your grave and you really are six feet under? What happens when everything I’m terrified of turns into reality and the monsters finally win? I can’t let them win. I can’t let them take you, so I’ll fight with all my strength and every ounce of sweat, blood, and tears and I won’t give up until the monster bites me because my scars have healed and I’m almost two years removed from that blade. I won’t sacrifice that for you because then we’ll be back where we were in grade nine, fighting for each other’s breath and hoping and praying that we will not be conquered. You were always the one to pick up my pieces and now that the roles are reversed, I feel like I’m not doing a good enough job of holding your head above water. You’re slipping through my fingers, gasping for breath and screaming my name with every interval of oxygen that fills your lungs as your ribcage expands, contracts, expands. Hush, now, don’t make a sound as you slip from my fingers because I can’t keep fighting for you. You said we would be living in the concrete jungle in a year and a half but you can’t live in New York if you’re dead, can you?

If I Were Courageous

If I were a mockingbird I would sing songs like the ones you show me

If I were a poet I would weave stories like the ones you speak of

If I were a dragon I could fight away all the things

That make your eyes glisten and your lips tremble

I could gnash away at all the thorns that have no doubt caressed your skin

And all the thoughts that make you stare out the window at something unseeable

If I were a butterfly, maybe I could compare to the way you make everyone speechless

I would spread my wings in all my beauty and maybe

Just maybe I would be a fraction of what you are

If I were an artist I could draw the way you make me feel

The way you make me all tangled up inside

If I were a lover maybe I could make you feel this feeling

Put these butterflies in your heart and a warmth throughout your being

If I were someone

Maybe I could make you notice how

I only need to look over at you to make me realize that there is beauty here

How the weight of your words place themselves like kisses on my ears

How the curl of your hair and the shape of your lips

Are a constant reminder of reasons to live

But if I were courageous

I could be all those things

If I were courageous,

I would tell you I love you,

I would tell you that this is crazy but you make me crazier

If I were courageous

I would stop writing poetry and tell you

That If I were yours

And you were mine

Together we could be something

Coffee

I look across

The cheap plastic table at you

Your eyes are fixated on an

Invisible heartbeat that belongs to the horizon

Somewhere far away

From the too-strong coffee that

Floats in tendrils of caffeine up to my face

The tears prick my eyes and I

Stare at your vacancy

So hard my eyes burn with how unreachable you are

Distanced by more than

Two cups of coffee and a crumbling raspberry muffin

I reach one hand across the table

Inch it like a world war soldier over two you

There are cracks running along the cold surface

And your hand lies in a fist on the linoleum

My fingers strain to touch your skin

But reality smacks me cold and hard in the face

And I quickly withdraw my hand from the

Sweet dream of you because

This coffee is too strong anyways

Blue

That night your eyes

Pierced through something thicker than blood

The immediacy of their blueness

Trembling my heart

And rusted footprints on windy piers

Still write themselves upon my pages

That night your breath

Warmed the insides of my wrists

And the depths of my hands

You taught me not to fear again

You kissed my scars like you knew their pain

And held my thoughts like the red-orange sand

Between our toes and in my shoes

And in ten thousand raindrops

From which we ran

I held you close and closed my eyes

Against the storm and against the tide

Desperately trying to keep warm

From oceans past and the presence of time

I see your face whenever I close my eyes

Remembering those August nights

Blistered from the sun and

Salty with the ocean’s kiss

We lost track of the future when we surrendered to bliss