You remember a time when you were not always here. It is not as distant as it feels. When your fingers so much as twitch, a shadow of outreach, it is (you are) there. As if you had never left.
(The ghost of you dwells beneath the surface of a pond, buried in a watery grave that sunlight fights branches to reach. On some nights, it looks above at the shifting shards of broken sky and waits. It waits till it has forgotten it was ever anything but waiting.)
There is a new bar in your neighbourhood. When you blink, you realize you’re seated at the counter. The high bar stool grounds you, for all that your feet are off the ground. The bartender eyes you, polishing a glass, and you remember suddenly the taste of green tea brewed with leaves from your own garden; the first sip always burnt your throat on the way down.
(You remember tatami mats and fireflies in summer. You remember the boy you turned away from on the day of graduation, and the weight of your bag in your hand the day you stood — alone — on the platform. You order wine, and in its depths you see the cardinal shrines where people pray to gods whom you’re not sure listen.)
Like a black-and-white film, you watch as a charming stranger takes a seat next to you. He has pretty eyes, and someone who is not you (but looks like you) tells him so. An outsider, you watch. The girl with a face like yours lets the stranger lead her to the dance floor. As you watch him place his hands on her hips, you think again of the boy with whom you'd watched the fireworks burst overhead all those summers ago. You cannot picture his face anymore, but his name is always waiting on your tongue.
You are wasting away, your mother had warned over the line once, you will not be young forever. A train ticket in the mail. Within the bone cage of your ribs, you imagine a black hole blooming, swallowing. I will make something of myself, you had told her, I am doing things the way I want to. I am not wasting away. Now, you struggle to recall what it was you wanted to do so badly the morning you stepped onto the platform, a bag heavy with dreams in your hand.
Some sleepless nights you wonder if maybe you should not have left, should not have turned away from that first boy. Some dawns you wonder if it would be too late to go back; to return to the sunset-painted shrines with the wooden plaques heavy with hope, and the gods who may sometimes answer. Yet you never do, because dusk is for reminiscence, dawn for musing, and the day for carrying on.
(It is on nights like these that the ghost of you stirs. Swirling currents, a shadow beneath the light, a phantom melted. The ghost of you floats to the surface of the lake, bloated, drowning for all that it has no need for air.)
On nights like these, when you clench your hands, the coarse braided cords chafe your palms. Memories hang from these cords like wooden plaques, and your body feels like lead. You are too light to weigh down. You are too light to return.
(The ghost of you collects withered leaves the way you used to thread fallen flowers into chains. Nature, nurture; decay follows bloom and bloom follows decay — the question you ask is not which came first, but which the cycle ends with.)
• • •
oof hello it's me again
it's been so long since i last posted written work on wattpad ksnxjdnx i'm so sorry guys are any of y'all still here
anywho this is part one of something i wrote for a school assignment! its continuation will be posted sometime next week when i finish editing :"")
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