Words

Words

Baz

Simon Snow’s bare feet patter into his bedroom where I’m typing up my lab report on the bed.

Technically, I live with Fiona, but I spend all of my time at Simon and Bunce’s flat. Most nights I end up staying over because Simon says he doesn’t like sleeping alone. It makes sense. Apparently he’s never had his own room before. He had at least one roommate in all of the foster homes he grew up in and when he was at school, he shared our room with me. That coupled with his frequent night terrors, it would be pretty cruel just to leave him alone.

Bunce said that she didn't mind sleeping with him, but Simon said that was weird (and I agreed). And I don’t imagine that Micha fellow would be too happy about his girlfriend sleeping in the same bed as the boy she spends all her time with while he’s stuck over in another country. She suggested a sleeping bag but Simon shut down that idea too. Said he felt bad about it. Typical. That leaves me. And I’m not complaining. Seven years of staring at his sleeping face like the creep I am and now I actually get to be in the same bed as him. There’s no way I’m giving that up. It’s a win-win situation. In more ways than one. I’ve liked the dark ever since I was a kid. Simon would call it “the vampire within me” but I liked it even before I was turned. It was in the dark that my mother’s fire burned brightest. But ever since I was kidnapped by fucking numpties and they kept in a coffin for a month, the darkness just seems suffocating. But I also just like being in his room. It’s so… him. Our room at Watford was too small to really do anything to. And Simon never had anything to decorate his side with. But now he’s got a part time job. (At bloody Starbucks. He probably only applied for the scones). He’s got a room that he can do whatever he wants to with. He’s got time to figure out what his interests are without worrying about the Humdrum or goblins trying to off him.

And his newly discovered interests are: space. Simon is completely infatuated with space. He majors in astrophysics and his walls are covered in posters of nebulas and blackholes. He doodles constellations on his arm whenever a pen is near and he won’t shut up about getting a tattoo of one someday. (“What’s stopping you?” Bunce asks. Simon says he’s afraid of needles and infection. I tell him that being afraid of a puny needle is idiotic when he’s battled literal monsters. Bunce points out that she can magic an infection healed. Simon asks if she can just magic him a tattoo. She tells him there’s not a spell for tattoos. “Well maybe you should work on that, Penny.”) Every few nights when his nightmares get too intense, I take him stargazing to calm him down. Sometimes, if his screams have wandered through the walls and woken her up, Bunce tags along. He lays between us and names the constellations that Bunce and I have known since we were toddlers but Simon had never bothered to learn until now. His eyes are usually red and raw, his face still streaked with tears. His voice and body still trembling from the combination of leftover fear and chilliness. But he loves the stars. He really does. So I do as well.

fantasy novels. Bunce and I have our suspicions that he only likes them because he misses magic so much, but neither of us would ever say so to his face. Somehow Simon had gotten through his entire childhood without reading Harry Potter once. When he mentioned this, of course I went out to buy the full set, but he wouldn’t read it. (“I just can’t do it. I open the book and there’s just so many words. And there’s seven books, Baz.”) Bunce, who was just as mind-blown about this as I was, set him up with an audible account and now he lounges around the house with earbuds dangling from his head. Every night I would ask him where he left off, and he would fanboy over how smart Hermoine was and how mad he was that Cedric Diggory died. I would lay with my hands in his hair, quietly agreeing until we both fell asleep. When he finished it, he was so distraught he barely talked for four days. It took another two days for us to marathon the movies. (We would’ve done it in one but I had class in the morning and I made him swear not to watch them without me.) And then he was done with books again for a solid month. But he kept griping about how he missed having something to do and that he wished he could listen to them all again for the first time. Bunce got fed up with it and downloaded the Percy Jackson books. At first he resisted, saying it felt like he was cheating on J.K. Rowling, but eventually he gave in. (He thinks I’m jealous of his crush on Nico but he is wrong.) Now he listens exclusively to fantasy novels, whether they’re well known or not. He’s got a heavy wooden bookshelf (which was as a bitch to get into the tiny flat) lined with all of the hardcopies. (Which doesn’t make sense because he listens to them all on audible. “It’s for the aesthetic.”) (The box set I got him of the HP books are on their own shelf. That’s so fucking cute. What the fuck.)

So, as I sit on his bed, enjoying the Simon-ness of the room, my boyfriend himself walks in. He’s wearing one of my sweaters. He keeps stealing them even though they’re a bit too big for him. (“It’s what boyfriends do, Baz.”) His lips are in a pout; his eyebrows are furrowed. He’s wearing a face that I know all too well. We have a routine by now. I set my laptop to the side so he can crawl into my lap. His arms and legs wrap tight around me and his face is pressing into the crook of my neck. He feels like he’s trying to crawl out of his skin. He’s not crying but I know that if this keeps up, it won’t be long until the tears come. I wordlessly bring my hands up and start drawing circles on his back. I know he loves that. I hum a bit. Occasionally rock side to side. I don’t bother asking him what’s wrong. I know he won’t talk. Can’t talk, rather. Simon has tried to explain it to me, but I still don’t quite understand it. I get that he’s always had trouble with words, but not talking like this is something else entirely. He says it’s like he’s trapped in his own mind. Likes he’s in a never-ending spiral of negativity that his voice doesn’t reach. Sometimes I can get him to respond by asking extremely basic questions. He takes deep breaths and answers in fragments. But usually it’s best just to hold him and let him come out of it on his own. Pushing him is never good. Early in our relationship, before I knew about his periods of silence, I would find him sitting on the couch, staring blankly at his lap, his hands clenched so hard his knuckles were white, and his mouth drawn into a tight frown. I would come over. Ask him what was wrong. Try to get him to talk. Effectively hold a one-sided conversation until it grew into frustration. It always ended with me yelling and Simon curled as small as he could make himself, shoulders bouncing with silent crying, every so often making small squeaking sounds in an attempt to speak.

So now I scratch his back, and hum, and rock. Until I stop scratching his back, and stop humming, and stop rocking. Until I’m just hugging him close and leaning us against the bed frame. After a while Bunce knocks softly on the door and comes in. We nod to each other and she sits next to me on the bed without a word. A few moments pass and I feel Simon turn his head to look at her. His grip around me is loosening but hot tears start to fall onto my shoulder. Bunce gives him a little wave. He shifts so he’s sat snuggled between us, just like when we’re stargazing. He takes a few deep, deep breaths and I can tell he’s coming out of it. Bunce takes his hand. He leans his head into my shoulder again. He brings his free hand to cover his eyes.

“I killed him.”

We’ve been through this before. We’ll go through it again.

li~quid ca~ndy

right now I’m sittin’ in the backseat sippin’ on a strawberry Fanta that you say tastes too sweet But I say tastes like liquid candy I guess I guess I guess I guess I say that too often, don’t I?

You ask me to join you. And I ask why. You say that you miss me. And I ask. why.

I wanna go back. I wanna go back to. When I was sittin’ in the backseat sippin’ on a strawberry Fanta that you said tastes too sweet. But I said tastes like liquid candy.

circle of sky

here, the sky doesn’t go on forever. it stays draped between the trees. it stays just overhead and just out of reach. it’s private and constant. it’s ever-changing and perfectly familiar.

here, the sky is a personal thing. here, the sky is separate from everything else. here, the sky has it’s own place.

it fits in well with my fantasy, this piece of sky, deep purple, dotted acrylic stars peeking out behind lazy watercolor clouds, the moon’s iridescence lighting up the small world around me.

this piece of sky isn’t much

but it’s mine

everything makes sense

Oh. The stars. I had forgotten about the stars. They had been replaced by city lights.

Oh. Her hand. Her hand is alive. I guess it always has been.

That’s right. I was alone. She was alone. It makes sense to be together.

Huh.

broken zipper

At first, it was just a vacation. I still had the old house, I just ate dinner at a different table. I slept in a different bed, but my old room was still there. I still had that connection. That promise to return. That reason to go back.

It was sold. Now someone I don’t know lives in my house. My room.

But still, there was the car. My mom’s gargantuan silver Toyota. The one we’d had since I was in elementary school. The only car that didn’t make me totally motion sick. I held onto that for a while.

It was totaled. They let me keep the mangled license plate. It was lost among the boxes.

And it keeps going like that. I comfort myself with a different item from my life,    from when I was actively living my life, each one more insignificant than the last, until something happens to take it away from me.

like the backpack from my old school its zipper broke and it’s close to unusable but i’m stubborn i guess or the binder i bought just because it was the same brand as the one i used a few years ago it ripped in half so i tape it back together every time the tape wears off

The Refuge

The only house perched on the only gravel road that split  my uncle’s property, [REDACTED]

“The Refuge” for short.

Our mail appeared in the only mailbox by The Gate, in front of the army of invading bamboo, next to the rotting tree stump, still taller than me, and annually engulfed in wisteria.

Whenever my cousin’s college friends overtook The Dock for the girls to tan and the boys to cannonball into The Lake, my dog whined restlessly at the door until they finally left. The Mound was the farthest area from our house in the Refuge, all the way down the only gravel road, down the steep speed-bumped hill that stopped my bike in its tracks until I was brave enough to ride up.

The Mound wasn’t anything but an enormous pile of dirt my siblings and I would venture to once in a bored blue moon. We carved shelves in its side for our favorite trinkets from nature and challenged each other to clamber to the top, which was covered in unforgiving brambles and thickets.

By now, our trinkets have long since been buried by a bulldozer.