I love endings, those moments that wrap events in fine, cool, burial linens. Beginnings are messy and uncertain. They don't always come, but endings are eternal.
I must've been fourteen. It was the last day of middle school, and was largely devoted to letting us wild n
(more)ew teenagers do whatever we wanted. Yearbooks were being swapped for signatures, doodles, proclamations of undying friendship. I forgot mine.
Or I might not have bought one. They cost a few dollars I didn't have. Or perhaps I was being a newly teenage bitch and wanted to maintain distance from the happy fray.
But like always, like always, I joined in eventually, differently.
I had a black sharpie in my bag, and pulled it out while my best friend and I were sitting on a low wall outside, watching and leaving things unsaid - I was moving soon. Moving away, always away. I asked him to sign me.
He did after less than a moment, in a scrawl like a banner unfurling on my upper arm. Another friend signed my collarbone, half her name on each side. Another stabbed initials into the crease of my elbow, periods dotting my spring-pale skin like track marks.
A line formed. This was Novelty. When my arms and shoulders and neck were hidden under a grimoire of strange kinship, a shy girl stepped up to stake a claim of me. Gently, she inched a finger, then the tip of the sharpie just under the hem of my tshirt. Her name and a cracked heart crowned my glacially swelling hip.
By the end of that sunlit day, the June heat and the needle-soft sharpie had scorched dozens of loving brands into my flesh. They faded, but pale afterimages lingered, dustless spaces on a marble slab. Burial linens unraveling, eternally. (less)
