fourteen feels like failure. where the days stick to ribs and evenings undress themselves uncomfortably into nameless nights. where i skip stones like bones gone rogue from my still-growing body. girlhood in medias res: pressed lips like peaches, bruised into a new season. fourteen, and i know about empty-handed apologies and split-open saudades aching into silence. fourteen and i feel fruitless.
my grandmother says this is how time eulogizes love and everything else incapable of being kept. all that is left is rotten: inedible truths held by humidity's crib. i laugh. i am fourteen and i laugh, because i do not yet feel the gravity of days looming over me, curving my spine into a comma. my grandmother's heartbeat is a punctuated pulse, her wrinkles marking memories. she knows the summer sun, the same one i was born under. girlhood is giving away so much, she says. you will find this same insincerity in other seasons.
eventually, time takes her with the season. summer sings of strawberries and simplicity, in which my own naivete unravels itself. of fruit sinking into teeth, of pulp and pits and passage into autumn. i find an eerie silence in the soil in which i am grown. still, i have empty hands, no kept memories of girlhood or growth.
my body, like a blooming tree, reaches for something greater.
