//Your Name is On The Radio Station We Listen To//
I watched ‘Ladybird’ with my mom and we both learned a lot of things about ourselves. We’ll never talk about it, but seeing her depart from the prison of melancholia in the years since has been joyous. I learned to let go of the anger I held, and we grew and loved each other as people growing and grown concurrently.
My first kiss was messy and stinky, it was summer, he had insane B.O. and held me too tightly in places I really didn’t want to be held. The next day I wrote what I would say the day I married him. My second kiss wasn’t much of an improvement, she says she doesn’t regret it, and the deception is flattering.
I wonder what it would be like to kiss you, sometimes. The fortuitous would be you finding it funny.
I forget to brush my teeth some nights, the same nights I forget to take my makeup off, and I wish that I didn’t say ‘some’ and mean ‘most’. I leave coffee mugs in places where they fall and stain things and there are days I’ll look at the shower and shrug and just leave.
I remember listening to Pink Floyd for the first time, I mean I’d heard them but I hadn’t listened till I was sixteen. and for the next week, that was all I(and I daresay the neighbourhood) heard. I’ll still stumble upon the marvel within me that those noises that weren’t music could fall into one another and make real art. You knew what art was, at that time, and I’ve only just begun to learn.
It is learning that you gave me, I realise, an education truncated by fate. As a book, you’d be stained with tears of joy and sorrow and chilli oil and old tea. But you’re not a book, are you? Books are stagnant and aged from the moment of conception. You move like youth, you grow like love.
I like doing crosswords and I’d like to be good at them but I’m so bad. I think you’re good at puzzles, you said you like them once.
You have this one jacket I think I saw someone wear on a red carpet in a magazine, and you wear it like it was made for someone else and became yours because you willed it to. That singer who definitely doesn’t look like you has a lot going on; Not that jacket, not anymore
I tried a leather jacket, it wasn’t my thing, I’ll show you the pictures. Those pictures portray bashfulness, naivete, debauchery, a pursuit of youth as cliched as it is gauche. Those pictures do not portray a leather jacket well worn. It was two decades late, unseasonable by a few months, and it hid the curves I wish you’d love.
There’s another movie I watched, it’s like a lot of the movies I like, it had people talking in rooms discussing ideas and dreams and desires. Chin-strokery of the lowest form, breaking the base rule of showing and not telling. Anyway, a woman not unlike you gets told “You make my world so much bigger, and I’m wondering if I do the same for you.”. Do I? Do your worlds evade my comprehension just by circumstance of birth?
I don’t want to love you. I do want to know you, and I know this too late. If you had boobs, I wouldn’t touch them either.
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