EMMA SWAN
A Peach like the Sun
tomorrow i will eat a peach again.
i will leave my room and run an eight hour lap
before i come back and collapse. tomorrow
i will brush my teeth and
put on pants and
look at people
in the eyes.
tomorrow is fundamentally the same.
tomorrow happens whether i invited it or not.
tomorrow always comes and
demands everything i have, and
it demands repetition. over and
over again i live tomorrows.
i show tomorrow my duty fulfilled and it
nods and says
see you tomorrow.
so i try to think of instead
what tomorrow can give me
—what i can take—
and try to make repetition wholly
mine.
peaches are always sweet and always a bit too messy
i can eat them
in the same spot of my kitchen and believe
time is flat
i love peaches because they are all fundamentally the same
i may look people in the eyes and
put on pants and brush my teeth and
run my eight hour lap, but
tomorrow i will eat a peach again.
How to Find Things
My sister keeps most of her things under her bed. She used to have boxes and drawers under there, but eventually she got frustrated trying to find the right container, so she got rid of them. Her stuff is just loose under there now. I thought she did it so I couldn’t get into her stuff. When she needs to find something, she’ll spend 20, 30 minutes rooting around on her stomach. It’s stupid.
She got her first apartment when I was 16. She moved to Bayonne right after she dropped out of college. She got to pick from two, and she chose the one furthest from the supermarket. She told my mom after secretly signing the lease that “This is what will keep her from going broke on Ben and Jerry’s pints” and “This is just what young adulthood looks like.” That was the last time I heard from her.
*
I have to go to her apartment today after lunch. One of my friends from high school set up this lunch date, and I couldn’t just say no, so I said yes instead. We haven’t seen each other since graduation. I was thirty minutes late thanks to answering my mom’s questions at the door and checking her car’s mirrors at least three times. We sit in a salad bar with too many windows and she chats at me. I think that, if I weren’t there, she would probably say the same things.
She is telling me about how she has this great internship for this summer. A startup that makes personalized hearing aids for babies needs a social media manager. “It’s going to be important work, you know? It’s going to feel good to make a difference. Like, this is what we killed ourselves for in high school, and now I actually get to live it. And college is fun, right, but there’s something about getting a taste of real life that’s just... so much better.” I want to discount the work she’s going to do. She’s running an Instagram account, not pulling people out of fires. But she is right, that this is the taste of the real thing, the “real world” that high school teachers told us we were unprepared for.
“That’s great, Vi,” I say instead, and I’m smiling.
“What does your summer look like?” Vi asks me. She puts a grape tomato in her mouth.
“I’m actually taking a gap year right now, so I’m more focused on applying to schools right now. I haven’t thought about this summer yet.”
“Oh, huh. Weren’t you going to–?” I cut her off before she can remind me.
“Didn’t work out. Not a big deal, you know? I think my mom liked having me home, anyway.” She gets quiet and awkward, the way people get when they ask you about something more sensitive than they really wanted to know. I try to pretend like her silence doesn’t make it worse. Our lunch ends quicker than planned after that, and Lane’s apartment is nearby.
My mom was a young adult in the 90s. When we take car rides, she likes to tell me about her wild younger years, her (at times physical) fights with editors and the mohawk she’s still unreasonably proud of growing. The story always ends with the apartment fire, her notebooks curling in the heat, the ink melting off the page, her life settling into a desk job and a family and a suburban home. She likes to believe the words went wherever music goes when you sing it, and then we get quiet. Her Chevy pulls into the rocky driveway, and we make dinner. Wherever the music goes, we cannot drive there.
My mom used to make my sister pick me up from school in her Acura, and then we’d each get a pint of Ben and Jerry’s to make the trip more worth it, and she would get mad when mine was 10 cents more than hers. We would fight about it in the car, but eventually she would find the yelling funny, so even though I was still fuming, we would stop. We did this once a week. She drove as fast as her music. We sat in abandoned parking lots and she ranted about high school politics and I tried to ask her for algebra help and she told me I should only focus on the things that light up my eyes when I talk about them. That any attention I paid to anything other than that was dropping the years of my life at the Man’s feet just because He asked me to. She did not help. Her philosophy was short-sighted at best, left out far too many of the obligations of real life. She later dropped out of undergrad her sophomore year after failing Calculus twice.
I showed her my high school application plan once. Millenium Prep admitted three students from my school every year. Only the best, decked out with 4.0s and extracurriculars, were allowed to don their olive greens and earthy browns. “You wanna do this?” she asked, and I said yes. She looked at it for a long time, and it felt like the question she was really asking was, “Do you want to be the kind of person that deserves this?” And even just in my head, I didn’t really know how to answer that. Maybe that’s because I knew I could deserve it, that doing anything other than deserving it was like setting the years of my life down and running away from them. It seemed like a silly question to me, the kind of question someone who could never deserve it would ask to throw you off your trail, to make you stumble. So I just nodded, and she just nodded, and we both just nodded, not really looking at each other. She said “I should finish my college apps” more to me than to herself, and then we threw out our pints and went back.
*
I get to Lane’s apartment a half hour before I said I would. The building itself has this very sharp, brick facade. It looks like it could use a power wash, but I can’t tell if that’s a painting choice or just grime set into the walls. Lane had painted one of the walls in her bedroom to look like exposed brick, and by the time she was a senior in high school, she said she thought it was tacky and hated it. I think it's funny now to see her whole building covered in bricks.
She buzzes me in without a word, and I hike up the stairs to her place. The railing is really cold and feels like it's slick with something, so I try not to touch it. The door is open by the time I get upstairs. She is paused in the doorframe, she points at me with a paint brush, but there’s not a spec of paint on her tight, low-cut shirt or her cargo pants. She’s taller than I remember, and her hair is in a weird pink mullet now, but otherwise she looks almost the same: athletic, tan, warm.
“Mae. Girl. What. Are. You. Wearing.” I look down because I genuinely don’t remember. It seems I chose a shirt I tie-dyed in a senior week arts-and-crafts project and some very straight, neat pants. Both of them are too big for me now, and they sort of billow about my body. This feels right to me. Nowadays I feel like I am mostly air. I look back at Lane, who is struggling so hard not to laugh that she’s nearly crying. I scowl. This is the first thing she says to me in two years.
“It’s just clothes,” I say. She snorts.
“Whatever okay come inside,” and I do.
The shoebox she lives in is almost clean for the exact reason I said earlier. I resolve not to enter her bedroom, lest everything she owns spill out of the door into the well-kept main room. She chucks the paintbrush she was holding underhanded into the corner onto a pile of various art things: a camera, some bottled acrylic paints, many many index cards. The room smells vaguely of ink and old takeout, but there’s no clear source. It smells like her room used to. She walks behind her kitchen counter and fills a cup from the sink.
“Want some?” she asks. I just shake my head. I’m standing kind of awkwardly in front of the door. It’s not clear to me where I’m supposed to be in this room right now, and Lane takes up the whole space in the span of minutes. She just walks around everywhere and touches everything a little bit. She is touching up the room even now, turning things off and on. “You’re early,” she says as she shuts the TV off. “You’re always so goddamn early.” And even though this makes me slightly sick to my stomach to hear, it’s also a bit of a relief to hear it, like seeing an old friend who has done you a serious wrong.
“Sorry, I was in the area earlier than I thought I’d be.” I hug my arms together. She stops walking the length of the room, apparently satisfied with its conditions.
“Yeah, no worries. Fuck a plan.”
*
My mom was halfway to killing her when she failed calculus the second time. It was another misstep in a laundry list of little things Lane did wrong, and like the rest, it was followed by a screaming match. My mom didn’t offer help, but she did pick up the tuition bills, wave them, yell, “Wait until your father gets home, just wait until he sees this — for once in your goddamn life, Elaine, think of ANYONE but yourself...” It’s funny to tell Lane to wait. She would rather quit than wait. But someone had to listen to Mom, to prove that putting the work in got you listened to, even if not by everyone, and so I guess it had to be me. “What is your plan Lane? What the hell are you doing with your life?” I thought about the hair my mother had after the mohawk, short hair barretted away from her eyes. She made the plan to grow it out, and then she did, and now she keeps it clipped up like she’s trying to build the mohawk back without committing to it. I wonder where the hair goes when they shave it off of you? The yelling went all night, but still she did not kill Lane, that night or ever.
Lane moved away very quietly the next week. She used to talk about “getting out of this dead, shitty town,” but she never gave specifics, and I always assumed it was because she never had any. One morning we woke up, and all of her stuff was taken from under her bed. On my mom’s frantic phone call, this is when she told us, “This is just what young adulthood looks like.” My mom had a million questions. What was the neighborhood like? Do you know anyone there? Most importantly, how are you paying for this? The phone can’t shrug, so she was silent instead, and eventually she hung up. My mom looked at me sat down across from her, arms folded, and she pushed out a sigh and put her hands up to her eyes and she made me promise her to never be reckless like my stupid sister, to keep being good and smart the way I always have been, to keep making her proud. It seemed so uncomplicated at the time to just nod to that. It seemed uncomplicated to put the years of my life towards the clear path to direction, to choose caution and deliberation, to hold contempt for Lane’s chaos and erratic behavior. I was lucky that my mom was showing me the way. It all seemed right. Lane was a shooting missile, but eventually gravity would combust her against the earth, the cold real world. So of course I was there for my mom as she grieved a child who was as of yet still alive.
*
I had hoped that maybe the Lane that found and kept a place to live would be far more responsible than the Lane who was a missile. She is not. Fuck a plan. She leans against the countertop and invites me to sit on the barstool. Relieved to have something to do with my body, I do.
“How’s college? All you thought it’d be?” she asks me. I pick at my cuticles.
“I’m taking a gap, actually,” I lie.
“Neat. I shoulda done that. Woulda saved me some money. What’re you doing with it?” “I mean, I won’t bore you with it.”
“Nah, I’m curious! What, start a nonprofit? Join the circus?” I can hear the laugh creeping into her voice as she talks. I don’t know how to feed into her joke. There’s nothing real I can tell her.
I start three different sentences to explain myself before I settle on one: “I didn’t really plan it. I just kind of stopped going.”
“No shit,” she says. “Something happen?”
“Yeah.” I stare at my hands. After so long denying anything happened at all, even this one word is difficult to hear in my own voice. I expect her to take a different kind of sick joy in this, to see the prodigal daughter fallen from grace, but when I look up, she just looks at me softly, a little confused, like I might break and she doesn’t know why.
“Yeah,” she says. Her lips press together in a tense sort of smile. Shifting the tone, she inhales quickly and deeply, putting her hands flat on the countertop. “So, you needed something, right?”
“Right.” I sit on the barstool and try to articulate what I need from Lane.
*
My mom had never really come close to killing me, not even halfway, except for during my first semester of college. She had suggested I commute from home to the state school I attended to save money on tuition, which seemed like the right thing to do. It was my plunge into that “real world” I heard so much about, that I held myself back from everything to prepare for, the thing my sister could never do but for which I was perfectly suited. Once I stepped away from everything, I was just there. My mother made it clear to me that I needed to become my own person. I don’t know how to be just a person. I’m still trying to learn how to do that. I’m only used to being kinetic, to being whatever the next benchmark needs me to be. And so when I stopped running, I was surprised by how still everything felt. It looked nothing like what I’d been told young adulthood looks like. All that was left around me was still air and my mother’s disappointment, which she made well known. She stopped loaning me the car. I think she was nervous I would cut my hair.
College was just as educational as it was made out to be, regarding realness. I learned that I am not perfect, and in fact there are very many people who are smarter and quicker than me. These people are taking more courses than me, will graduate earlier than me, and have never answered a professor’s question wrong. I also learned that you are not magically gifted purpose when you matriculate. It does not fall into your lap like a roller coaster’s safety belt. You have to find it yourself. The only problem is that when you start looking, you have to open your mouth and let words out, and sometimes they burn you on the way to wherever words go when they burn. My instinct when I learned I could belch fire was to keep my mouth shut, and so kids with their words figured out spoke instead.I am starting to think that there are worse places for words to go than wherever music goes. I am starting to wish I could drive my words there in a Chevy built to protect a family. I call this a gap year to anyone who gets curious, one that I decided during my first semester I really should take. Records are private, so no one needs to know that college administration would more accurately call it a medical leave, which is their most polite word for when a student cracks and can’t force herself to come back anymore. No one needs to know except those who witnessed it. The most valuable lesson I learned in college was not in class. I learned that being a missile was not the only way to get my mother to grieve you. I learned that having a breaking point, too, was a type of death.
It has been two years since I last spoke to Lane. I look around her apartment and I see that her walls are coated in framed photographs and art pieces. The closest ones to me bear her signature, something big and bold and loopy. She just signs it Lane. I clear my throat in the silence to give myself an excuse for not having answered yet.
“Why’d you never visit us? Or call?” The words almost force themselves out, I feel them burning along my throat, but there are worse places for words to end up than the open air.
“Something happened. You know, life.” She pauses on that, as if holding the words in front of her and contemplating if they are enough. “I needed to be who I wanted to be, and, you know, LIVE. So.” She gestures around herself. “This is me living.”
“Are you happy with it?” She does not hesitate.
“Yes.”
She looks in my eyes and I look at hers and for the first time it is like looking in a mirror and we nod. Her eyes are lit up completely, and I wonder how it feels to have that kind of fire. She finishes her glass of water and sets it to the side. I can see her mind working overdrive trying to figure me out.
“Did you come here just to find that out?” She is trying to look through my eyes to see what is in them. I look down at my hands again.
*
Lane keeps all of her stuff under her bed. It’s a ridiculous cleaning strategy, but I guess it works for her in the limited way that it works for her. The things I have in my room are meticulously organized. I can categorize any miscellaneous object I am handed into the schema of my room. Even I fit comfortably in the spaces I have designated myself to fit. If I was ever going to look for something, I would not ask Lane to help. I used to think about Lane asking me to help her delve into the area beneath her bed and laugh at the prospect. I was never sure if I would help her with something she brought on herself. I didn’t think that she deserved it.
My mother wanted to know, among other things, why I was going out today. I told her about lunch with Vi, which was a convenient way to at least get my car out of the driveway without issue. But also I wasn’t sure why I was going out. I guess I wanted to drive fast and listen to loud music. I needed to know, if I was following a path, where the path led.
*
“How do you do it?” I ask.
“What, live?” I’m not sure how to answer because I barely know what I’m asking. My mouth is its own beast at this point. I don’t know what words are inside it. “God, I dunno. I just do it. I don’t know how to plan shit or any of that stuff you do, but I think I’m working with what I’ve got okay.”
“But how? How do you know it’s going to work?”
“Oh, I definitely don’t. Listen, I make a lot of mistakes—I’ve made a lot of mistakes— but I’m not gonna stay somewhere that makes me feel like absolute shit most of the time. And I’m not going back either.” And there’s a note of defensiveness in her voice, but above all she looks afraid, like maybe I’m a very cleverly laid trap.
I say, “I made a lot of mistakes, too.” She snorts. “Yeah, okay.”
“I did!”
“Listen, don’t sweat it, okay? You’re allowed to be perfect or whatever. I’m not gonna come at you about it, I really don’t care.” And I can tell that she means that and I can see her cleaning her glass and putting it back away and she is living in her own house and I don’t know what happened to the years of my life but I am starting to believe there are better places for decisions to go than the pit of your stomach and maybe the best place for them to go even if you can’t drive them there is a tacky apartment in Bayonne where you can lock the door and decorate the inside yourself and you just have to hope that they can get there once you’ve made them. But she means it and she closes the cupboard.
“I’m sorry,” I say, even though I don’t really know what I’m sorry about. The words just match the pit in my stomach so I say them. She shrugs.
“Mae, why did you come here.” She leans against the wall, away from the counter I’m sitting at, crossing her arms. Those times she drove me home, the cadence of conversation was so similar. Things were light, amicable even, until they weren’t. Everything goes well until it goes horribly wrong. I pick at my fingers and think about mistakes.
“I think I’m going to drop out,” I tell her. When I say it, I realize it’s true.
“No shit,” she says, eyebrows raised. I’ve got her attention.
“I don’t want to though. I want to live. I just–” And I don’t know what I “just,” and so I scoff in frustration. “I don’t know who I’m trying to be, and every time I think I’m close to figuring it out, I just hear fifty different reasons I’m wrong.” She’s nodding.
“Did I ever tell you I used to play softball?”
“No. I didn’t know that.” There were no pictures or anything. How had this never come up?
“When I was pretty little, you probably were too young to remember. But I really hated it. And Mom would just always tell me that I was meant to play softball, like it was my destiny or whatever. But you know what? I really hated playing. Couldn’t think of something I wanted to do less.”
“And she just let it go?”
“No. I used the bat to bust up her laptop, and she pulled me the next day. ” I am a little embarrassed to feel some hope leave me. I don’t have laptop-destroying bravery, which means as far as I can tell, I’ll be hearing about my failed destiny forever. “Point is, she won’t let something go until it’s really, definitely over. There’s a reason you haven’t heard from me.” And with a jolt I realize that this is the door of opportunity closing. She’s not coming back, and I’m surprised to feel that I really wish she were. There is a part of me that knows that once I get home, I will be talked out of this feeling in a thousand different ways. I will hate her, I will pity her, I will imagine she is a completely different person from the one standing in front of me right now. I don’t think I’ve tasted anything so real about myself as I am right now. And I think maybe this is what purpose feels like.
“Do you think you have any extra space here?” I ask her. “I can stay out of your way. You’ll barely know I’m here.” I try to explain myself but it just comes out as stuttering so eventually I stop. She stands back away from the counter and shuts off the sink and she just looks at me for a while. Her face doesn’t give away very much. I like to think my body language is as unreadable as hers while she’s scrutinizing me, but I can feel every nerve in my body shaking so I assume I look like a disaster.
She waits for a painfully long time. “Tonight?”
I just look at her. She does look different, but I don’t think she changed. I just nod. She starts moving about the space again, back towards the main room with the TV and the art supplies. She picks things up and puts them in drawers. Drawers.
“The couch isn’t bad. Should work for a bit. Let’s get you a little set up.”
Light filters into the room from a small window, creating glowing strips across the carpet that Lane walks smoothly across. She looks up at me, a few things in her arms, and gestures me towards her mess with her head. I shuffle over, take a blanket from the ground and start to fold it. It is a faded olive green.
I think it will be nice to know Lane.