You are thirteen. You and your friend have a crush on the same boy. He is about two feet tall and sings like a terrible angel. You are about six feet tall and your laugh sounds like a dog toy. She comes up to your chin and she is slowly going blind. Your voices run together like water and mud. At night you lie awake, thinking of what they said that day.
Her birthday party is held at the skating rink where everyone broke their arms. The floors are hard and the kids are hurtling forward through disco lights in sloppy circles like none of that ever happened. You remember being in bed with your friend’s siblings while their sister was waiting in the ER with a floppy wrist.
You skate timidly, your crush skates rapidly, your friend glides backwards as if in a dream. Your crush gives your friend a tiny plastic penguin and you feel flooded. Your heart is broken. Your heart is a rock. It feels like a well of cold water rushing up beneath you. You will never be the same again.
In bed, listening to The Beatles on your tiny cd player, you are unsure of why the penguin moved you so much. You think it seemed intensely heartfelt and you would like to be, one day, on the receiving end of something like that.
Three years later, your friend is killed in an accident, in a car driven by her older brother. Closing your eyes, you remember waking up in a cabin with her when you were little. You could only ever sleep in your own bed. She sits up in her sleeping bag and looks at you. You are sitting in the wooden bathtub in the corner of the room, warm water slowly filling the space around you. She doesn’t say anything, just kind of blinks at you and lies down again.
You remember when she wrote on her school notebook ‘green day ROCKS’ and then as an afterthought, ‘also, coldplay.’ (The boy liked Coldplay.) You remember her telling you, ‘i don’t trust anyone but my brother’. You remember that she was adopted from a small country in Eastern Europe. Envisioning her as a baby wrapped up in a blanket in a basket, you smile without meaning to.
The year after her death you are walking around in your parent’s attic and you find a tiny plastic penguin. It is identical to your crush’s gift, from the skating party all those years ago. You have been prescribed so much klonopin that you just kind of blink at it, and then put it in your pocket.
You superglue the penguin to the dashboard of your car and watch it vibrate as you power down the highway. You drive that car for a while and then one day you crash it. The impact tears the penguin from where it stands, but you are unharmed except for a bruised knee. You get out of the car and you are crying. Lights are flashing again and you are deep in the disco, feeling it in your legs like a child. A boy looks out the window of his apartment and sees you there, sobbing in the street in front of your broken car. You date the boy. You get some speeding tickets. You get older. From its dusty position under the passenger seat, the penguin doesn’t move at all. And somewhere way back in 2004, you are breaking your arm again and again.
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image by Johanna Owen, 2017. Johanna is a hermit who lives in the Rocky Mountains. Their writing, photography, and visual art is coming soon to winnow.space
