camileewrites

Mila likes to imagine the sun as a pinwheel. Summers are splintered and on Tuesday afternoons, leaving a trail of wet dizzy footprints bleeding into a Sharpie pavement, she imagines Jules wrinkled, hair the color of the unswept moon (she thinks the place must be dusty), but can't, can only see her as a scorched promise, something bright and fleeting and brilliant. August midnights the brim of cicadas died and maybe the universe forgot to breathe already but Mila doesn't know yet because time refuses bribes and the sun keeps spinning as a pinwheel.

summer spills over in viscous torrents, a village of swirling dust and noise, simmering in late June. children with eyelashes caked in mud, bent over like loose twigs curving under November snow. close my eyes to believe this is just remnants of a nightmare clinging to the cobwebs of my mind, but when sunlight bleeds through spider lashes they are still there, waiting for me to teach them aerodynamics even though I have no inkling myself.  

To whom it may concern: Remember the Julys we spent freezing syrup in the simmering ninety-degree heat, always mistaking the flicker of satellites for shooting stars, racing each other on cool green lawns that you claimed were Terabithia? Then when I turned nine, an age where simplicity becomes luxury, you stayed and comforted me. We both saw Mother and Papa locked in a harrowing rivalry sprawling across weeks that blurred into months and then years, competing to raise their voices louder, to race each other to court, to acquire the house, the nice Crate + Barrel furniture, and, oh, me. You were there, murmuring it'll be okay it'll be okay i

Alexa -- a place you got stuck. Blue hair and Great Gatsby shirt. Fell for the idea of her. Reality and dreams blurred, not sorry. Wrote poetry she will not read. Never knew her, yet loved her.

her name was Jules-short-for-Julianne and she tasted of the grape gum that comes in packs of eight, the kind tucked away on the shelf at the Grocery & Gifts on 21st and Hawthorne, and I didn’t know I was supposed to close my eyes. she traced my spine with her teeth (I figure now she was trying to crack it open, let my marrow spill over her lips) the stars leaning in when we kissed looked like rice, honest, not wishes or dreams or satellites, two girls collided on a sidewalk, boots drenched in gasoline puddles that glistened scarlet aquamarine gold, trying to find something with their tongues but we fooled nobody.