le chrysanthème et sa poupée

i. i remember sitting with you at the mall food court after we fled from our own home in tears. i was nervous when you were blankly staring down the road, nervous as you continued speaking in abstracts, nervous as you contemplated the worthiness of living this life. i was sixteen and begging for us to run away. you stared into the empty air. around us children were wailing in their seats, young couples were flirting with love, families were waving each other down with trays in their hands. the normalcy of it all cut through the heaviness that hung in front of us, tables empty of food, hands empty of each other's. why can’t we be like them?

ii. i'd get hurt. you'd tell me to apologize. we'd sweep the floors searching for scraps of happiness. then i'd get hurt again. or you would. we'd apologize. rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. but why does it feel like we can never wash our hands clean of this?

iii. i thought it was just a phase. maybe the unwieldy anger, with time, with age, with distance, can shift and make way for what truly lies beneath. surely it's love. surely it's just sadness transformed. but when i saw him raise his hand with fires burning in his eyes, i understood that these things don't just fade by themselves... they're buried. we tried to smolder the flames with our hands, but the embers are still crackling and the ashes are still falling. rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

iv. someone told me yesterday that when he was a child, he would fill his backpack with juice boxes and dream of running away to see the world. i laughed into the phone and said i was exactly the same. but you and i both know it's the reverse, that i've been all around the world trying to run away.

i imagined what it’d be like if we had the chance to run together, le chrysanthème et sa poupée. i'd lay my head down on your lap and you'd stroke my hair. i'd cry and you'd tell me that i need to toughen up, that the world isn't kind to people like us, too fragile. but tell me, how do we toughen up now, when someone has already broken us into so many pieces? when can we stop sweeping?

v. today i watched the sunrise with eyes half closed and a mind half dreaming. i pictured you, in the vastness of the ocean, where we let you go and watched you dissolve into the pacific. then i pictured me, here, in the vastness of the los angeles sky, engulfed in the orange brilliance of a new day. and then i pictured us. i was wrong. we aren't fragile, we aren't broken. we are ubiquitous. we are here, there, and everywhere, across the sea and across the sky, you and i. no more rinsing and repeating. from the droplets of your waters to the condensation of my skies, cycling in and out of each other, being, becoming, and disappearing, over and over and over. we are so much more than we ever thought possible.