Melting Ice Cubes, Senior Year; Ritualistic Loss
I have a memory of my dad balancing a bowl of cereal on his thigh while watching American Idol on a Tuesday night in 2011. I prop my chin on the staircase railing to eavesdrop, and eventually, I scoot down. Like in Bread and Jam for Frances, he feeds me a spoonful of cereal, lets me stay for ten minutes, then sends me back upstairs. Versions of this same moment happened every night.
I watched PBS NewsHour the night before my first day of senior year, in the dark, while eating cereal, which made me remember dad’s cereal and American Idol. Fatherhood is the best and worst of a man. Change is the best and worst of a girl.
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I go to the park to kick rocks and scratch my neck to deal with the unique apocalypse of September. My body heat leaks out through spaghetti straps. The sun sets at 7pm, not 8.
In Gracie’s birthday card, I wrote something about how both of us catastrophize and ruminate, we both live in the past and the future, only tapping into the present to journal fifteen pages in one day and space out again. I hate birthdays, and writing Gracie’s card made me realize why. I spend each year Gone, disassociated, floating above the mortal form of my body; then I promptly ground myself at 11pm on April 2nd, the benchmark of a birthday forcing me to reckon with the time I missed. People who are present don’t hate birthdays. People who feel like they were there don’t hate birthdays. Only Gone people feel threatened by birthdays.
I yelled at everyone on my sixteenth birthday, seething and red-hot, bobbing in a simmering vat of panic. I felt like I was receiving too much and not enough attention, I eyed my candles with gross obsession and fantasized dipping my entire face into the swell of heat.
Five months after I turned sixteen, I moved to Michigan; I tried to be someone who left, and I was confronted by the visceral truth of my attachment. I bury myself in every phase, every place. I waste time worrying about wasting time, I pressurize the punctuation of eras, I plant my roots deep, and crumble when they tear. I know I will be a ghost when I die, because every ending I experience is jagged and raw. I am forever haunting, forever haunted.
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I wrote in an essay that sixteenth birthdays are the first of a girl’s many deaths. Maybe the second death of a girl is the beginning of senior year.
During dance today, while I rolled around on the floor in the pale light of the window panel, I felt the presence of my ninth grade self like someone might feel their dead mother. There was no message, no plea, just presence, then absence.
It felt apt. I woke up with Give Me a Minute by Lizzy McAlpine stuck in my head this morning. There was no paired memory of a dream to explain it, but Give Me a Minute underscores every frame I remember of 2021 because I listened to it like a girl listens to the first album she decides is her favorite. Today I shuffled it, and the sun pressed itself up over the fairgrounds at 7:30, and the silhouette of Syracuse emerged clearly, and clouds formed, and cars shifted in lanes, and it was the same as every morning from the past six years.
I almost cried during the DNC when Barack Obama premiered gray hair and subtly etched wrinkles; proof of life, of more time passed. It’s September and things feel like that. Pressurized and fleeting and finite. After three years of Gone, I have to confront the incubated form of my child self. The experience of reaching the cumulative destination of high school feels like flailing on a plateau, choked by a heavy, liminal paralysis.
I am bracing myself to experience this year as a person who misses things. As a girl, a ghost, a body of ice that will melt whether I am Gone or not. Lizzie smiles and says ‘the time will pass anyway.’ I used to hate that, probably because it is anti-Gone in nature.
