Posts tagged literature

the infinite summer.

    That summer lasted forever, stretched on forever, curled outwards to the very edges of the universe.  It hooked itself around the folds in my skin and it pressed itself against my lungs and the heat was the kind of solid, unforgiving heat that chokes all the breath out of your chest and makes you weak under its weight. 
    I kept my sister’s secrets for her even though I didn’t know what they meant and I didn’t know what it meant to keep them.  But I wrapped Twiggy up somewhere safe and I put her into a box under my bed and I let myself drown in that summer.  That summer like a wave, that summer like an ocean.  That summer like a hot, stagnant, lake.  Like a dozen arms pulling me underwater, filling my lungs, seeping in through the cracks in my skin and filling me up with scum and mold and sand.
    Did I think I would ever see her again? 
    I don’t know.
    But every night I stood in the middle of her room and every night I felt the air charged with the energy of her, an energy that was quickly slipping away, receding, falling backwards and falling away from me. 
    I used to think: the air in this room is air expelled from my sister’s lungs.  The dust in this room is Twiggy’s skin, the errant hairs in this room are hairs lost from the top of Twiggy’s head.  
    The air conditioners whined and buzzed and groaned with electricity but the house was hotter than ever.   The hair and the skin cells were vacuumed up.  And I’m sure if you could measure it, the air was wiped clean of her.  Every breath I took in, I breathed her up and she caught on the inside of my lungs, melting into my body.
    I used to think: now we are the same.  Now we are the middle ground my mother so often wished aloud for.
    Now the space my sister left behind has been filled with my own shallow breaths.    

an excerpt from a longer piece

by Katrina.