MoonLune

When I think about the spooky clown I think about my fear of wrinkles. The new ways I’m going to be perceived. I’m not like my mom, she laughs when I don’t think she will. I fuss over my own face over the sink into a toothpaste mirror and massage the lines between my eyebrows where I carry the microscopic weight of the things that won’t go my way.

If I can splice the shame of getting rejected from multiple grad programs over that last many years into something more manageable, I’ll start some new career soon. I forego eating spinach by the fistful for roasting a bell pepper, all the colors end up in the same load (I know), and my life feels like a granite countertop. Nothing is as good for you as soap and water.

 My relationships shift under me like sand on the hardest hike of my life. My first time away from my parents, my brother, the bedroom where I learned not to cry, but to track, and to feel the isolating implications of healing. I press my fingers to the red and stitch-like scar under my belly where they took a piece of me that did me wrong. Please don’t say anything remotely moving because I’m making up for lost time. I can cry now, too much, too fast.

I miss losing teeth over it. To a pillow fight, into a peanut butter sandwich, to my old neighbor Barb. Now I lose things to miscommunication, the body-fever stretch turns into a mental Olympic level feat where I try to tell you that I love you but instead I plaster myself over with paper-Mache reasons and clinical action to soften the blow that I used to be seventeen, someday sooner I’ll be thirty and I’m scared to lose.

Over the phone I speak to an old friend. I ask him what he wishes he knew. It’s my birthday, and I’m only one month into my new life but all I can think about is washing rice and answering emails. He’s been my guide through oil checks, the best Indian restaurants in Long Beach City, when not to send a letter (but I do because at the time I’m high on my hormones), we talk about musicals in sewers, he taught me about bicycles. What do you wish you knew? He said a lot of things about family, about the self, about art. Don’t wait to do it, don’t wait for it to be perfect, do it now.

This is for me and it’s also for you.