We were elementary school survivors. Of bike crashes, of playground
fist fights, of jumping off the swings at just the wrong
angle. Remember the bruises we got, we used to say "that one
looks like the moon if you look at it from where I'm standing." After
my lip got busted by a boy in my class and after I punched him
back I noticed the bitter salt of blood trickling down my
chin almost like the way the raspberry popsicles my mother bought in the
grocery store melted, thick and dark red and dripping onto my shirt.
We were middle school drifters, not exactly sure who
we were or who we wanted to be, just sure that we could come
home and our mothers would be there waiting to wrap their arms around
us and ask us how our days were. Curious and confused and somehow
still filled with joy we walked the streets of this new/old
town and watched each other bloom and ripen into soft
blueberries like the ones that grew in my backyard and on the sides
of mountains. When people called us names we realized
words could cause wounds that we just couldn't see, nothing like
the scraped knees and moon-shaped bruises we knew so well.
We were high school wonders, dreamers, lovers. We were
high school melancholy, tripping over the loose threads of summer
and sadness we couldn't quite put words to. Love and fear felt
like the same thing and there was no way to tell the
difference, caught in a cycle of loving and losing. Our skin was stained
with dreamy blackberry juice bruises, if you looked at it from this angle you
could see the story of the people we once were. We needed our
mothers but didn't know how to say it, didn't remember when
we stopped coming home to their arms around us, didn't
remember when we stopped wanting that familiarity.
Our spines carve the way home into our backs like road
maps and our bodies look like full moons in the daylight if you
just look at them right. We take a left at the busted lip and follow the
trickle of blood until we see the blackberry bruises. This is the
way home.
