The Last Word On Nothing

Do you remember when we used to yell at people from the roof? The light was longer then, and gold the way that it is in Colorado in fall, and we’d climb out your bedroom window and sit on the sloping awning over the porch and call out lines from movies to bewildered passersby. The lot of us were bony legs and arms lost in baggy clothes, then—members of a nameless generation that was not quite Gen-X and not quite Millennial. We were pre-internet and post-ennui, stringy haired and plaid shirted, sections of rope as belts, chipped nail polish and choker necklaces, pant cuffs frayed from slipping beneath our heels as we scuffed along sidewalks in combat boots or sneakers, our smiles marked with the metal trackways of braces.

None of us knew we were beautiful, then. We didn’t yet know how to love ourselves. But we were all in love with each other in that way that belongs only to teenage girls. Awestruck and skin-close, we drew on closet walls and each others’ arms, slept in down-lumped piles on the carpet when the VHS and whispering finally went quiet, slipped long notes into each others’ lockers, slipped into each others’ families. We were as tender as lovers, as vicious as sisters, knowing where the worst hurts lay, and prodding them when we needed to cover our own. We pushed aside our child selves, we tried to grow hard and sharp and cool and brilliant; we tried on things that the world insisted we should be, even as we fought to be something of our own.

Do you remember writing new captions on Family Circus cartoons, converting its saccharine plump children into hilariously evil demon babies? Do you remember scrambling rocks and biking dirt roads and the first time I went cross-country skiing, as graceless as a fawn learning to walk? Ouija Boards and play at witchcraft and PJ Harvey on the CD boombox? Do you remember when baggy pants gave way to black and more black? And all the treasures we found in Dumpsters and drinking coffee at night and Tibetan food and sitting in a circle on the high school lawn long after last bell?

We didn’t know yet, all the things that were coming. That we would scatter and thousands of miles would lie between us. That we would struggle, yet more and too often, to believe we were enough, even though we had always been enough. That the worst hurts would sometimes grow into secret self harm. That we would lose mothers and brothers. That the world we grew into would be this dark. That we would learn to see its beauty anyway, to make beautiful things even so, to make lives the best we could, gathering in new friends, partners, our own children, arrived or on their way. That even as we grew apart, we could always come back to each other like family. Like vicious sisters. Like tender lovers.

Didn’t you know that we would miss you?

Today, I walked to the river with a bouquet of dried flowers for you, and for the things we were when we knew each other well. The night had been cold under its cascade of stars, streaked with one long tail of meteor, and the morning grass spiked with frost, each shadow a frozen absence. But below the bridge, the water brimmed with broken sun, its stones luscious and bright as sucked hard candy. I peeled the stems apart—white petals blowing back against my legs and scattering on guardrail and concrete—and let them fall one by one into the winter river. The last flower was the same crimson you once dyed into your hair. I watched it drift into a mirrored riffle. I watched it grow small and vanish.

Maybe it will reach the Columbia River, the heart-vein of the place I live now. Maybe it will sink, each red petal falling away, darkening like a lick of flame, spent.