Swallowing Summer

There is a voice inside my head, like a conscience if your conscience  earned his money by managing back alley boxing matches. Like Jiminy Cricket, but a little fucked up.

Mostly the voice stays slumped over on his bar-stool in my mind, just waiting for the day that he can throw in the towel. "You shouldn't drink on an empty stomach," he says. "You could die of alcohol poisoning."

"I'll die someday, regardless, and tequila is just as good a way as any," I tell him. This is called critical thinking.

Usually the voice is at least mostly right, but sometimes the voice goes crooked, no longer mine. Sometimes the voice is my sharp-tongued mother's, my bitter-hearted aunt, their words like bullets that made a home inside my ribcage. I treat this like a game: which splintering thoughts are my own, and which ones are just splinters? It's like when you play chess against the computer even though you know it's all rigged--even when you win, it's rigged.

"You should be skinnier," fucked-up-jiminy-cricket says, "throwing up is the easiest way." "You should be better at speaking, at making friends, at writing. Mediocrity is a slow-killing poison." "You should open your wrists like a scab. Don't you remember the kiss of the knife? Don't you remember how nice the burn felt?" 

"That was a long time ago," I tell him. This is called recovery. 

The voice went into part-time retirement sometime last year, between who I am now and who I was then. Every year I change with the seasons, with the moon, a lunar cycle of a girl. I am seduced by summer, tangled up in sunlight with heavy limbs and eyelids, and I forget what it means to be cold. Every autumn I am forced to thicken my skin as the air grows teeth. By winter, I am hollowed out and hungry for warmth, waiting to fill up my own space again. Every spring I thaw out, shedding a dozen different versions of myself, a dozen corpses of the same girl with different hair, different hearts, different voices in their heads feeding them different thoughts like pomegranates: one for every month I'm sleeping.

The girl I am now is awake, in love, and the voice in my head is a warning.

"Love never feels like it does in the stories."

I think about her, and I fill up like a glass of water, clear and bright. "You're right," I tell him. "It's better."

It's a sin, but what isn't a sin these days? And how can it be rotten, when she tastes fresh from the vine? How can it be wrong when her hands on my skin feel like sunlight? I kiss her, and it's like swallowing summer, warming me up from the inside out, and I forget what it means to be empty.

"Girls shouldn't kiss girls," says fucked-up-jiminy-cricket. But since when do I care about shoulds and should nots? 

I kiss her, and everything is quiet.