Lily Walters
i.
you told me, once, that we are a mosaic of star stuff.
we were cramped together on your little twin bed, staring up at the peeling plaster of your
ceiling, the water stain in the corner above your desk.
everything seemed to push against everything else, then. hardwood floors with plush rugs, the
scent of bergamot with the specks of dust floating through the air. we were mosaics and the
world was a tessellation of us and not-us overlapping in a way that made sense for just brief
glimpses of time.
your nails felt like teeth in my side, that night. the indents carved into my skin like a tattoo, and
stung long after you pulled away. but it reminded me to not reach too close, dare let my fingers
cross your ribcage like a promise. it was half past two: i knew that times like those were better
spent back-to-back in search of something new.
ii.
i keep expecting you to take flight, like the stars before sunrise, or the swallows that nested in
the birch outside your childhood house. not a home, you’d remind me. some things were just
meant for being.
i asked you what was home once and you just spread your fingers, said the space between
them is where everything you loved most would reside. the things you’d touch in tandem; the
absence of what you wish you could.
now, you pluck the light like a lyre, and in its stead leave darkness. you call it sleight of hand, or
an optical illusion. i think it’s magic.
iii.
i have a question, if you’ll let me ask you.
there is a girl that you want to know but she refuses to tell you. there is a girl that seeks
retribution with the hope that she’ll crack like glass. this girl is paradoxical and strange and you
want to know her anyways.
what happens when the girl is negative space stitched together by whatever you can hold onto?
what happens when the girl is gone?
it was a saturday morning, the cusp of dawn—you sobbed in my arms, then left without saying a
word.
iv.
in the dying light, you seem to flicker like a ghost, or something close to one. i suppose it’s
apt—you’ve grown to deal in shadows and semipermeability.
look, you say,
i’ll trade you:
a story for a piece of me.
i’ll trade you:
the press of lips against lips for an absence that’s twice as long.
. a shadow for a shadow—it’s only just. you are cruel, but you are fair. your lip was busted
that summer day and my skin was sticky with sweat. you laughed and i laughed through the
fluttering in my throat and prayed to whatever gods that listened to girls who kissed girls that
you would do it again.
v.
in my cupped hands was seventeen years stripped like sawdust, skin anew underneath the
grime and dirt. i gave them to you like an offering, a holy communion on the tattered carpet of
your childhood bedroom. you smiled with gentleness, though it could have been pity. you could
never differentiate between guilt and desire.
maybe you covered my hands with yours, let the hem of your sweater sweep over my wrists.
maybe you said you loved me, or you thought you could, if you tried hard enough. or maybe you
didn’t say anything at all. i can’t quite be sure.
the singularity of a forgotten memory is this: it is the feeling of mourning without knowing quite
what you’ve lost.
it sits on the tip of your tongue as you grope blindly for something you know once existed but no
longer does. you feel like it’s there, swear by it, but time has taken root beside the memory,
stretching gnarled branches around it like a cruel embrace, a crown of thorns of your own
making.
vi.
we’re twenty and we’re a patchwork of hope and dead ends, ad infinitum, ad infinitum. but we
could pretend, just for the night, that cerulean dissolves to cobalt and lavender to dirt. that this is
love, not an ouroboros of all the things that are doomed to last and ruin us all.
i think you understand what this all means. i think you understand what i mean. for someone so
pedantic, you are riddled with imperfections; I’d like to kiss them all, if you’d let me.
you promised me, once, hand in hand, skin on blistered skin, that we would never grow old, you
and i. that we are angelic, and forever, and i swore to believe it. you never gave
absolutes—perhaps i had hoped what you said and what you meant would lap, like a broken
grandfather’s clock. perhaps, then, it would slow the fall as we careen away from the sun and
into the earth.
Lily Walters is a second-year Northwestwen student majoring in biology and music. A big fan of words, she has taken to writing in an ill-fated attempt to avoid talking the heads off of everyone she is around. In her free time, she enjoys photography, composing, playing flute and piano, and watching the sunset.
