After the Thaw
I try to steal Sonia’s black jeans to wear to work on Saturday morning, but she is one step ahead of me—they’re hidden somewhere. I wouldn’t be able to find them without waking her up, so I put on my own jeans instead.
I stole her jeans successfully last week and we fought about it when I got home. I told her I was sorry, and she told me that I was only sorry because I got caught: “That’s not guilt, it’s disappointment.” Ouch. “Will I ever get them back?” I ask, even though they are her jeans. She says maybe, if I ask next time. She loves to tell this lie of “I would definitely let you wear them if you only ask first.” Then I ask, and she says NO, I can’t wear them, and I start stealing them again. Then she starts hiding them, and I wear my own jeans to work, and I feel like something has been taken from me.
Sonia has always been like this. She has always been armed with a clap-back. When she was five, she went through a phase of saying “I know I’m right, so I’m not going to argue.” I don’t know where she learned that, but it always worked; It made me go catatonic in defeat.
I have also always been like this. I have always been focused on having things and losing things. I had a pair of Bella Ballerina Skechers when I was six. They had little pink hearts that lit up when I stomped my feet or twirled, so I was always stomping around and twirling and staring down at my feet like they’d leave without me. When I’d see ants gathered on a sidewalk, I delighted in smashing them dead with my Bella Ballerina Skechers. It was all obsessive and neurotic and tragic.
I have a job and I’m not chill about it. I talk about it all the time and refresh my bank account like I’m playing a slot machine. Will my 150 dollars spill into my account if I refresh the page again? Maybe if I check on browser? I just checked again. Still no pay drop. Miguel has the same job as me, we are baristas together, and it makes him feel like a friend to me. We are equal, we are on a team together. Home is where the brothers are, which means I am finally home because Miguel is on spring break.
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“Can we do a psychic experiment? To see if we can read each other’s minds?”
Lizzie asks where I got this idea and I tell her. Mom spent $250 to be part of something called Dream School, where she logs onto weekly Zoom meetings with other dreamers from around the world to learn how to “reach within and unlock the secrets of the inner self that appears each night.” The Dream School students are assigned partners to pursue psychic experiments with, which led Mom to be staring at a stranger’s forehead as if it were a TV screen through the 3x5 frame of her phone. When Dad saw the $250 dollar charge from This Jungian Life, I had to explain to him about dream school and how it was something that was important to Mom.
Yesterday, Lizzie and I went outside to read our books and it turned into just laying in the sun. “This is sensory absorption time,” I tell her. It's important for writers to spend time absorbing with their senses. A boy yells “2v2” and a game erupts. They twist and twirl and leap, and at the end, two of them are the winners. I want to tell them that there’s no difference between their 2v2 game and ballet.
The days are stretching and lengthening and pulling forward. The light is coming back, just like they said it would. We stare at it and blind ourselves and wish we could drink it. Lizzie opens up her arms to hold it and to be held. It is holy and medicinal and warm. We go on the swings and talk in a fake language like babies, except we are not babies, so the swingset shifts and rattles and screams for help under our weight. I turn eighteen in 22 days and Lizzie turns eighteen in 19 days, and I like this arrangement because Lizzie has always been a little bit more advanced than me. She does her homework on time and she has a skincare routine that involves at least four products. She turned fifteen and sixteen and seventeen before me, so eighteen should be the same.
I was born on a Tuesday in spring. It was after the thaw; crocuses were puncturing the padded mud, and people were starting to sit on the lawns outside of the UPenn frat houses again. I feel like I was there, seeing it all, even though I wasn’t. I tried to explain to my dad why spring is important to me: It feels alive. I feel alive. The heaviness is gone. Everything is breathing again. When I was getting frantic, he said, “I get it. It’s your birthday, and Easter, and it’s warm. Everything is shedding layers.” On the swings, Lizzie and I talk about daylight savings and Google “where does the hour go daylight savings.” Everything is shedding layers.
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At work, I make lattes and think about how my friends will become ghosts soon and I don't blame them. I don’t blame you, I tell them all in my head. You meant something to me when we didn’t know what the world looked like on the other side. I think about gravity, and about how while it pulls down, time pulls up. We grow up, out, away from any kind of center that can hold. I’m scorching the milk now, wondering if it’s possible to have a friend forever.
A charming coven of old women slide two tables together and pull chairs from around the cafe to fit themselves. Miguel seems to know them; he gives them the same order number without asking if they’re sitting together. He asks me if I “know their deal,” and I say no. “They graduated together. Like, 50 years ago. And they do this every month.” I answer myself: maybe not forever, but something close.
My seventh grade life science teacher told us that one of the only things people with dementia remember how to do is hold a baby and treat it gently. Even when their Self is gone, the instinct to hold and keep is familiar. When this is all gone, I want to be able to still hold each other, around a table while a girl and her brother burn our lattes. The instinct won’t go anywhere. The hour didn’t go anywhere. Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. The hour will come back in the fall.
