Korah Martin
Baby Teeth
Dear Bear,
Yesterday I saw you for the first time in months. I honestly thought it was all I needed; one glimpse of round cheeks flushed red or the blonde cowlick that never flattened, but seeing you through stained glass was no better than singing lullabies to old photographs.
(I found a few more in an old cardboard box beneath my bed the other day. Do you remember the time you emptied an entire carton of milk on the kitchen floor?)
I was told you've taken to swearing- that you seem to have a knack for only repeating the things that were hissed accidentally. It must be a strange thing; hearing you struggling to pronounce words with more than two syllables.
I always thought that the phrase "you learn something new every day" was a bit of a stretch, but just this week you realized you can reach the jar of hard candy on the second shelf if you pull a chair over to it, that the front door will unlock if you flip the little silver switch, and that the babysitter wasn't really mad when you snuck into the fridge and drank half of the creamer, because a snort is meant to hide a chuckle.
It's weird to think that one day your freckled complexion will be riddled with acne and you'll kiss a girl with braces behind the stairwell at the middle school or in some stuffy closet that smells of mothballs and shoes during your first game of Seven Minutes in Heaven. You'll be so excited you'll clack teeth and use too much tongue but at that moment all that matters is the feeling of her breath on your neck and the small, delicate lumps under her shirt. Hands that small couldn't possibly ever learn the skin of someone else.
I wish I had seen some kind of realization in your eyes the day I left.
(I wish you had cried.)
You don't yet understand the concept of "goodbye", and therefore can't possibly quite understand the concept of "I miss you", but I'll say it a thousand times anyway, so that when you finally figure out what I mean you'll know I've meant it since the day we met.
I miss you.
Now.
Always.
Love,
The Lady in Blue Who Came to the Door (Whom You Didn't Recognize)
Little Boy Blue
there are a hundred
photographs
in the space underneath
my bed.
a match burnt out every face
except for yours.
and I miss the way
your stomach swells
when you laugh
and the freckles like
a comet's tail
across your cheek.
the way you wished on
dandelions and eyelashes.
you wished for a snowstorm
every time.
soon you'll be old enough
to have girls call you
on the phone.
you'll tell them lies about
love and time
like you have an infinite amount of both.
and before I know it
your atoms will have kissed skin and hair.
we'll have to meet
and introduce ourselves again.
so I'll let my yard
fill up with weeds.
I'll use every eyelash
to wish for you.
August 9th
My dad says the funny thing about memories is that they're spiteful. The more you think about them, the more you try to remember their details, the more they change. They blur their own edges, trying to make you wonder if they ever really happened or if you just made them up inside your head. He says that if memories were people, they'd be introverts. Once the party's over, they want to shut themselves away and rest. They don't want your attention anymore.
I kissed a girl for the first time when I was eleven. Every kid knows that your first kiss is a big deal, so I tried my hardest to lock the memory of it up so I'd never forget it. I replayed it in my head every night before I went to sleep, trying to remind myself where I had placed my hands and whether or not I could feel her eyelashes on my face. I wrote her name in notebooks and on restaurant napkins and spent hours deciphering precisely what shade of brown her eyes were. Now the only thing I remember about all is the faint taste of strawberry Chapstick.
I have a few memories that aren't really memories at all, but are color-by-number pictures filled in with the greens and yellows of things people have told me, like the time I broke my arm when I was four. I don't remember the pain of the fragile bird-bones snapping in half or the fear of realizing the ground was suddenly no longer beneath my feet, but I've heard the story so many times I can easily picture the ice-slicked porch steps and can hear the crunch of bone against concrete as if I had a recording of it.
It often makes me wonder how much of myself is real, and how much has been sewn together like some teenaged Frankenstein. Sometimes I question who's holding the needle; the memories like jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces or the ones that are so carefully polished I can't risk smudging them to take a closer look.
Sometimes I wonder if she was real.
I hope she's doing well.
Love now and always,
Frankenstein's Monster (The Boy Who Might Not Have Been Born)
