Trapped in Forever

62 ~ Angry With Me And My Kissed Lips

While the sun was dipping into the earth, disappearing from view as it ducked behind the swaying green leaves of trees and the dark shingle adorned rooftops and the rectangular, multicolored brick chimneys, streaking the sky in layered variations of the color sherbet and blue, the faintness of the cobalt hue still floating in the sky above our hearts with the rim of pinks, yellows, and oranges wrapped around the bottom of the world, we had fallen back onto the bed, wrinkling the navy fabric of my duvet under our backs, and I laid my head against his chest, hearing and feeling the vibration of each of his heartbeats under my ear and cheek, my dark strands of hair falling over his forearm, and his bicep and elbow were beneath me, his fingers resting on my ribcage, and his chin was nudging against my temple as we stared up at the ceiling, mesmerized by the glow-in-the-dark stars as they slowly shone their neon colors and revealing the constellation of Orion’s Belt, stuck to the ceiling with adhesive foamy, white stripes, looking down at us as we laid on my bed, silently, the sound of his heartbeat and the staccato chirping of birds outside and the buzzing of the wings of bugs as they whizzed near the window, the melody of the crickets slowly emerging.

Only a small part of me was concerned about my mother, perhaps carrying a laundry basket of folded clothes or one oven mitt adorning her hand as she entered the room, her lips readying to tell me something when her eyes would notice the boy lying beside me, arms wrapped around me, and in my bed. It wouldn’t matter to her that both of us were wearing our clothes, or that it wasn’t the first time we had laid down or fallen asleep together, because her lecture would include the words opposite sex and door open and things escalade fast, as if this were somewhat of biological mutation instead of two people held close together because they were afraid of the other slipping away if their fingers and arms loosened. Maybe even a little part of me wanted her to walk in, omitting the respectful knock, and stumble upon us together, to realize that this wasn’t any boy but that it was Orion Mathers, the boy she had told me to forgive—well, I guess I did that, huh, Mom?—and that she would see how much different I was now rather than how good I use to be then, a year earlier, when I was ignoring signs that I shouldn’t have ignored when Orion and Roxanne silently broke up and I wished that my best friend would come back, the pre-Orion Roxanne who liked the smell of fruity lip-glosses and dotted her ice cream with variegated M&Ms and sang to Michael Jackson without the concern of being judged by a certain blond haired boy who might have looked twice if her voice grew any louder or anymore out of tune. So many times since she had died, I continued to wish that I could somehow go back to that but right then, held in his arms and the strength of hindsight still bitter in my mind, I didn’t want to go back to that girl.

She was foolish and oblivious, so obsessed with seeing through her rose colored glasses that she ignored everything, even the signs that meant that her best friend was drifting away from her and slipping into the darkness, fragments of what made her Roxanne slowly dying and crumbling to the ground like shattered glass, the sharp edges glinting in the light, but she still looked away and pretended that she couldn’t see that Roxanne was falling apart and pretended that she couldn’t put her back together, and then when she finally looked and realized that she was gone, she blamed Roxanne, as if she had been looking and searching for her the entire time, as if she hadn’t turned away and wished that they had never dented the bumper of that green station wagon because she wanted things to go back to the way they had been for her own reasons because she was tired of hearing Roxanne talk about how she should have never told Orion about her pica.

She blamed everyone but herself, even though she had always been there, just like Orion had once said. I had always been there. And now, as I felt a lump forming in my throat and my eyes grew hot and watery, that felt so much worse than leaving her because I had seen everything, knew everything, but she was gone anyway. Because I wasn’t the kind of friend she thought I would be when she showed up at my house that night when her parents announced they were getting a divorce, ranting about how horrible her mother was as she swallowed mouthful after mouthful of melting vanilla cream and M&Ms, the colors dyeing the white ice cream. I had always been there but now she wasn’t, and it was because of me.