We stand and face the window on the back porch. It’s frosted over because it’s the morning, but you can still see the outside world and it doesn’t look any different in the morning than at any other time of day. Maybe something in our bones is telling us it’s too early too be up (although really it’s too late,) but we’re slumping and slouching and grumbling ever-so-quietly and our eyes are drooping and we both look like hell. So we walk in our early morning trudging walk towards the world that looks the same no matter we feel like and the ground is softer than I thought it would be (probably from last night’s rainstorm) and our shoes sink slightly into the muck.
We’re going somewhere, you told me so, but you never specified where and a little bit of me is worried and rather a bigger bit is just excited.
The front of my head used to hurt sometimes, light and noise made it that much worse so I never felt like being around someone who was so bright and noisy and you were. That made this morning time so much more beautiful, so much more potent and precious.
You turn to me and say something and maybe I respond. You take a deep breath of thick morning air; soggy like someone has dipped it in tepid water. We have a job to do. We have a promise to keep.
We are 16. This is important. We are old enough to do everything illegally now. I listen to my own footsteps, carefully making sure they make as little noise as possible; yours are out of my control. You trudge through a slightly crunchy bit of grass, brittle bones of crabgrass mixed in with the dead sod of late autumn, only it’s really early spring and the packed, damp, brown earth should be in a frenzy of greens and purples and those other gaudy colors you’ve always insisted on wearing.
You tell me that the mud is hiding a boiling mass of life underneath, that the shoots and the stalks and the leaves are just below the surface, waiting for the time to emerge. I smile, but it makes me feel sick. I can feel the beat of life beneath my bare toes even as they lose sensation in the chill, and it isn’t like a heart beat, it’s like a tick. I tell you it’s a clock, you ask what it’s keeping track of, I say I misspoke. It doesn’t keep time; it counts down to whenever the idea of time ends. You tell me I’m sick in the head and you grab my arms and kiss my forehead, then you shift to my mouth for a little while and I bite your lips and jingle my earrings in that stupid manner my mum always told me was undignified.
We keep moving, now sticky air is slowly oozing by and as the wind picks up, it gets slippery, sweeter.
I can still see the fat waning gibbous moon, despite the relative lightness in an ashes-of-roses sky. Long forgotten words of a song come bubbling out of my throat, unbidden as something in me remembers a walk through the woods a long, long time ago. (Iseethemoonthemoonseesme/downthroughtheleavesoftheoldoaktree/pleaseletthelightthatshinesonme/shineontheoneIloveoverthemountainsoverthesea/thatswheremyheartislongingtobe/pleaseletthelightthatshinesonme/shineontheoneIlove)
There aren’t any oak trees near here, no deciduous trees of any kind, really. There are dinky suburban bushes and a couple towering maples and a ginkgo that smells unbearable in the summer when it’s pollinating. I sing the song anyway. You sing a verse about a lark I haven’t ever heard before. I smile. You tell me I look sweet, even though I probably look a little deranged with my wild hair and overlarge eyes too light for my coloring so that the irises clash with my face. I tell you, you look picturesque with your papery onionskin cheeks and dense eyelashes and lips as plush as any model’s. I bite my lips too often. They are always red, always bloody, but you say they suit my face, whatever that means, and we dissolve in our acid laughter, melting into puddles next to a car that neither of us owns and I’m afraid to drive.
I asked you once if we deserve to be alive. You said no, but we deserve it as much as anyone else. I ask the same question now. This time you say we deserve to be dead, but we have to be alive first to understand what that means.
We are cold and damp and we smell like sodden clay and dust as we get into the car. We are alive for a little while and my cheeks burn, but I smile. Your smile never got any smaller.