A kid about eight sits down next to me, while his mother
and baby sister take empty seats a few rows forward.
“I’m Edward,” the kid says, unprompted,
pulling out a stack of books.
Volumes about animals. “What’s your favorite animal?”
I don’t answer. I try to tune him out by pulling down
my knit hat and resting my head against the window.
But he keeps talking, and asks me again,
“What’s your favorite animal?”
“A jellyfish,” I finally answer, because
when I think about jellyfish, I think about silence.
“Whoa. That’s cool.” Edward flips
to a page in his animal encyclopedia.
“Did you know that there are certain
kinds of jellyfish that can live forever?”
He starts to read an entry.
“ ‘Once the immortal jellyfish reaches adulthood,
it transforms back into its original juvenile state.’ ”
“I hate to break it to you, kid,
but nothing lives forever.”
Row
Kennedy stands inside our front door
twenty minutes later,
unraveling the layers
of clothes wrapped around her.
The snow on Kennedy’s boots
begins melting
on the tile floor,
yet I still feel cold
standing here
in wool socks.
“For real. It’s a blizzard out there,
and my mom is less than thrilled
about me leaving the house,
but I said that I was worried
about you guys.”
She’s looking around the kitchen
and starting to notice that no one
has turned on any lights
this morning.
She notices
the recycle bin overflowing
with milk cartons
and yogurt containers
that no one has touched
in three days.
“Um. No offense,”
Kennedy begins,
“but it feels a little
like a cesspool
of sadness in here,
and something is
literally rotting.”
It’s like she can see
all of our emotions
out on display.
I don’t want to
have to explain to her
right now what’s going on.
I don’t want to share
with her about Maribel,
or the baby, or about how it feels
when grief seeps back
under your skin,
like a roof that leaks
one drop at a time.
Instead, I wish I just had
the foresight to clean.
Ariana
The bus rumbles into the college town of Loganville,
and there’s a line of students clutching to-go cups
and overnight bags for the city.
In the distance, grounds crews with snow shovels
and vehicles outfitted with plows scrape away
ice and snow on tree-lined walkways in front of red brick dorms.
This is exactly how college looks in the glossy catalogs
that Maribel had sent to our house. I get it.
It’s like the perfect interlude in a song. Like sun breaks
after a long spell of rain. Like the day after it snows,
and even though it’s freezing, you wouldn’t trade anything
for the way the world glistens, untouched.
But it’s like I have an aversion to this level of a stylized future.
Everyone with their Bean boots and quilted totes.
“I think you’ll be surprised to find people
who you relate to,” Maribel once said to me.
She held out a stack of brochures.
“They may have different life experiences,
but there’s something about lying around a dorm room
and bonding, the collective hardship of challenging classes,
the shared yearning to be someone better,” she said.
How can it be better? How can it be so perfect?
The experiences of our lives cannot be reversed.
“It’s not about the best school. Private or public.
In state or out of state. Two-year or four-year.
It’s about who you show up as
during your college experience.”
A girl stands alone, waiting to board. Checking her phone.
In the distance, across the quad, I see a group of brown girls
in sweatpants and bundled in oversize jackets.
Laughing. I wonder what is so funny. I wonder
what it feels like to laugh so hard that your breath
looks like clouds coming out of your mouth.
I want to believe Maribel, because maybe she is right.
Because she at least knows what it’s like. She’s Filipina,
like Dad. She’s brown, like us. She knows what it means
to be and have been a young brown woman,
to exist in our skin.
She knows how to believe in a future.
She knows how to make one.
I want to believe, because Mom isn’t here,
and Maribel is trying.
Row
“Are you going to help?”
Kennedy empties
an overflowing recycle bin.
I follow her into the garage,
where she dumps the contents
into a large blue canister.
Someone,
someday,
will have to haul
the recycle bin
out to the street.
Preferably after
someone,
someday,
shovels the driveway,
but I didn’t want it to be me,
the only member of this household
who is around to notice
the chores to be done.
Besides, Dad was the one
who loved shoveling snow.
It must be an adult thing.
The satisfaction
of clearing the way
for the inhabitants
of a home.
Of providing something
as small as a pathway
out to the rest of the world.
Excavating trenches
in a battle against
Mother Nature.
Except for the imprints
left behind
by Kennedy’s snow boots,
no one has cleared a pathway
to the street.
No one scraped the driveway bare.
No one has ventured outside
since the snow started falling,
except my sister
who left at some point
in the middle of the night
when the snow fell the hardest
and her longing to escape
overwhelmed her.
Ariana
A girl with a guitar case strapped to her back runs for the bus.
Someone is trailing behind. I hunker down low in my seat.