perennials

the rocks were jagged beneath us and tattooed with spray paint that softened like sweat on our fingers. new york city shimmered distant, a needlepoint constellation stitched against the june horizon. as we sat there i didn’t even think to ask where your mother had been buried. maybe i should have, but i don’t know what kind of flowers she would have liked best for me to leave behind. i think that her favorite book was where the crawdads sing. i don’t know the etiquette of a cemetery—if it’s socially acceptable to leave a novel at a headstone. it’s just occurring to me now that the movie just came out and she’ll never see it.

in that moment i wanted to melt into you the way tear droplets bead together on chrysanthemums during a funeral. the evening buzzing around us, the cliff below us slicing into darkness, the city glinting in your glasses. suddenly between their frames i could see us again three years ago when you first texted me, “do u have plans this afternoon?” and i replied, “no, what’s up!!” you took me to our high school team’s lacrosse game—you had just painted your nails—they stood out waxy white against the dull chrome of the bleachers—i noticed because i couldn’t meet your eyes—kept looking down. you graduated the year before me, so we haven’t watched a game together in a while.

“my father’s plumeria plant is going to bud in august,” i told you when we were sitting on those rocks before the skyline. i didn’t know if you cared—but he does. over four humid summers of longing i’ve watched its stem writhe from soil to sky. “i wonder if i will move away before it flowers.” pause. graffiti splattered near my foot—4evr yung! R + D ‘03. R and D must have grown up by now. i wondered if they had kids and then hated each other. pause again and then i told you, “i’m not sure if i like the way time passes.”

this time last year your mother was still alive. there she is standing at your kitchen counter bent over a pyrex measuring bowl and asking me if i like snickerdoodles. of course, i tell her, she smiles, tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, leaves a smudge of batter clinging to the tendril, wait fifteen minutes, i smile and you do too. then she asks me how my mother is doing and i say same as always and she says, she is so strong, i hate cancer.

i think you probably hate it more than i do, now. your mother probably hates it the most because it ate her from the inside out in only a month. when i found you in the bathroom at her wake i wanted to strangle every single other person in the building. like everyone staring at her corpse all done-up came to shed a few halfway tears and mutter in the threshold as they shuffled out, this is such a tragedy, i’m so glad it isn’t my mom in there, her poor daughter, she was supposed to leave for college today. you were supposed to leave for college that day. don’t you look at her like that! i wanted to scream as you convulsed in my arms in the bathroom and i made eye contact with myself in the bitter grime of the mirror. don’t you look at her unless you know how it feels! but i guess i was a little unfair: i didn’t really know how it felt either, and i hope i never do.

and so a year later we were sitting there on those rocks before the skyline. your sweatshirt was so big that it swallowed you, a part of me registered how small you looked, maybe you were losing weight, maybe your heart just takes up a little less space now. you were talking about how much you missed suburbia since you left for boston, but i wondered if you really just missed your mom. “it may surprise you, but after you leave, you will want to come back,” you were saying. i felt teardrops on my face, and then realized that they were only rain.

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