Contrails (chapter 1)
Contrails gutted the sky when it was still blue, while it was still breathing.
I know this is in color because I can still see the salmon painted walls. And the stenciled, flat green Ivy that borders each closet, archway and window- that’s very vivid also. This isn’t in black and white like it was before:
I sat on the bed while she dressed.
Esther said she was sad.
I said nothing.
Out of the side of my eye, I saw the dark shape of her skirt being pulled into place over her hips. Zipped, buttoned, smoothed.
Her legs were soft, lean, though she never exercised; they were beautiful. She shaved them all the way up to the top of her thighs but there was no need to, she had very little body hair. She bent over the bed, over my legs, to grab a shirt on the other side. She could have walked around. The skin on her breasts was thin like paper, veins glowing like blue filament. They were bigger than mine, deserving of the real lace and silk bras she kept them in. This bra was grey satin, like the monsoon sky that threatened to keep me here. It matched her underwear which were now hidden.
I said nothing.
Out of the side of my eye, I saw the dark shape of her skirt being pulled into place over her hips. Zipped, buttoned, smoothed.
Her legs were soft, lean, though she never exercised; they were beautiful. She shaved them all the way up to the top of her thighs but there was no need to, she had very little body hair. She bent over the bed, over my legs, to grab a shirt on the other side. She could have walked around. The skin on her breasts was thin like paper, veins glowing like blue filament. They were bigger than mine, deserving of the real lace and silk bras she kept them in. This bra was grey satin, like the monsoon sky that threatened to keep me here. It matched her underwear which were now hidden.
What I can see most clearly when I think about the last time I saw her is her mouth. Her teeth with the top two protruding just enough, bigger than the other teeth, over-biting the inner part of her plump bottom lip. They were the kind of lips that caused visions and left you flushed and ashamed. They didn’t look like lips at all.
The next morning I would leave Phoenix. I was saying it would be for good. And it would turn out to be true.
"I'm going to miss you."
Her eyes were on me, followed me if i moved. She watched in a way that made it seem like she was looking somewhere else. This desperation of hers conjured things about myself that I hated.
"Are you mad at me?"
Mad? I had no words. None that I would give to her. And why should I be mad?
For eating my last bowl of lucky charms a few years earlier? Maybe that was kind of a big deal; if I didn't have breakfast when I first got up, I wouldn’t be able to cope with the rest of the day. She knew that about me. But that was a stupid reason to be mad, it wasn’t the Lucky Charms.
"I should come with you. I don't want to be with Tom anymore. He's freaking me out. I bet I could get my mom to buy me a ticket. Do you want me to?"
Fuck Tom. I refused to answer.
I had become a cliche and built a wall. That's what you do when you can't use drugs anymore. Its called outwitting your sobriety. Keep those splintery neurons sanded down- like self induced Electroshock Therapy or a psychic lobotomy. She was smart, surely she was aware of my strategies by now. No one could get through what I had crafted; it was a mother fucker of a wall.
"Claire, are you gonna talk?"
I kept my eyes on the pages of my book, the one I had planned to read during my flight out of that hell. My eyes moved from left to right and back like a conveyor belt conveying nothing. I couldn’t see the words.
"Do you like this lipstick? You can have it. Its a good color for you. Here, come here."
She gently sat next to me, opened the lipstick and leaned in to my face.
"I dont want it," I said, my jaw stiff, not wanting to let any words pass from my mouth to her ears..
"Just wait, just wait," she whispered, her breath reaching my nostrils. "hold still."
I held my already thin lips tight and held my breath so as not to breathe in any more of her air. She dabbed a deep, blood red Lancome on them. Her own mouth puckered in sympathy. It was a childish look for her, all puckered up, but she was just a child still. I knew this, but everyone else took her for a woman.
I got up and walked outside. It was hot. Always. Late September, late monsoon. The light was changing enough to give the illusion of something different, a promise of better days.
The house I lived in was nice. It may have been cedar that shingled the outside of it, creating a look of wealth. There were nice trees and plants and even roses in the yard. I think of this house and I see the sky, but that happens when I recall any place I've ever been: the sky. Always a different sky. Never the same one.
I didnt smoke cigarettes anymore so standing outside had just become standing outside. I tried new things, like looking at leaves and flowers, seeking out something beautiful about them, but it wasn’t enough to dull the sharpness in my brain. Trying to force calm and beauty made everything worse and just increased the constant skull pressure that felt exactly like when you take Black Beauties or some other cheap, drugstore speed. The skin on your head becomes icy and stretched like you have been half scalped, but at the last minute you were spared,and the dangling leftover scalp was pulled tightly across your brain and bones to make a new one.
I was without a crutch. I had banished drugs, even legal drugs. Even the ones that would help me. I refused to take the most benign baby aspirin for fear of death, for fear of being shot into another dimension, for fear of losing control. Control: an essential ingredient of solid walls.
She followed me outside. Didn't even look up at the sky, which was charged with dark clouds and warnings. Her open palm extended out to me.
"Want some?"
A small pile of Skittles: another peace offering. The purples were missing.
"No," I said. The very last thing she'd ever get from me.
The next day a plane would take me away from everything I had failed, that had failed me. It would take me from the girl I had fallen for without realizing it. In full blown panic, I would try and read the same book I'd used as a prop against Esther's presence the last time I had seen her. Trying to decipher a jumble of words, I would scan the same paragraph over and over for the entire flight (when not crouched in the bathroom praying that the plane not crash, or on the toilet unable to stop my bowels from purging all the poison emotions ) Once, after my guts were emptied and I had cried enough tears that left the walls bigger and stronger with me in the center feeling more serene like in death, I would come to the end of page 20 only to realize I hadn’t seen a word, but had only seen her mouth and her hands. Her hands were strong but her handshake was weak. She did that on purpose.
My two favorite versions of her: when we first met and she was 15 and she loved the Doors and Michael Jackson. We were oiled summer girls at Big Surf where a giant wave machine churned out chlorinated desert ocean; And years later, when she came back from a stint of living with her dad in San Francisco. She had turned dark and very interesting. Black Victorian skirts dragging behind her, black hair dyed blacker,shaved on one side, Siouxsie and the Banshees t-shirt, baggy and cut to hang low enough to expose the top of a black lace bra. She seemed smarter and deeper than before. We were going to become Wiccans. We thought we had powers. That was when we understood each other again. We were excited to be back together. We had plans.
But my plans would change and do that ridiculous thing with 'life is what happens while you making other plans"
But my plans would change and do that ridiculous thing with 'life is what happens while you making other plans"
.
Her plans would change too, but she would die.
Her plans would change too, but she would die.
"Death is what happens when your'e making other plans...."
My sweet Esther.
Annotations and comments
Highlight textThanks for posting your work. -Ryan
"The skin on your head becomes icy and stretched like you have been half scalped, but at the last minute you were spared,and the dangling leftover scalp was pulled tightly across your brain and bones to make a new one."
I'd strike from "but at the last minute" to the end. Feel free to disagree. Or you could keep the idea of the latter half of the sentence and try to build a new sentence or refine what you're working with. For me, the sentence ultimately tells me when it's done, if I'm listening closely enough. On another note, for some reason even though "icy and stretched" contradicts itself in meaning, to me it works and reads very strong, like something you'd find in a poem by Neruda or possibly another Chilean. I'm not sure which though...