Kanami Ayau

dead girl   

Here is what I remember: when we were sixteen our chemistry teacher said We are all slowly going blind and you spent the next year shielding your eyes from direct sunlight, stepping over cracks in the sidewalk, lacing your shoes right to left. When we were sixteen you cut all your hair off and almost drove your dad’s car into the ocean. Now there are ghosts everywhere and some of them belong to us and those are the ones we were afraid of all along. Now you walk me home and when you ask what I’m thinking I say my grandmother tells a story about how she once took a walk with her mother twenty years after she died, I say the way I want you has its own climate, like how storms are magnetic, I say there’s no fucking way I’m digging you up so don’t even think about it, I say nothing and walk alone in the cold. The girls in the park at night in their too-tight heels and oil-spill dresses gather in clusters like pigeons and I hope to god that they get home, that they have warm places to go to, people who love them. When we were seventeen you stood waist deep in a swimming pool and said Nothing ever really dies and I believed you then and I believe you now despite all the evidence. When we were eighteen we went up to the mountains to see a meteor shower and all the stars came raining down on our heads and you reached for me and it was the shortest war on Earth, shattered world records by light years, armed conflict that started and ended in the millisecond between our bodies. I don’t know how much more I can say. I don’t know how much longer I can do this. The tangerine glow of the morning sun and the trucks blaring their horns on the street below and your wicked smile—principium essendi, principium cognoscendi, that was me, blinded by beauty, and that which I was trying to understand was the kind of thing that cannot be seen by eyes: holy ghost, divine fervor, ecstatic blur. In my dreams I am wandering through that house searching for you, passing through rooms that still hold the smell of your shampoo and the imprint of your head in pillows; I can hear you in the next room murmuring along to the radio, the pad of your sock feet, but every room I enter is empty, and I wake searching for you still.