spider webs

the end of the world, loneliness, and sentimentality

Everything I write these days start with the sun. It is summer, so I guess there's reason for it, but still— every piece of my writing from the last two weeks begins by describing the air (hot, humid, thick. A tongue on the skin, lover's breath in your ear) and what the sun is doing (bearing down, hanging in the sky like a coin, a giant yellow eye here to burn your sins away). Let's start there.

The summer sun finds me like an old friend, simultaneously familar and new, slipping into the city gracelessly. It’s hot out this weekend— the air smells sweet and salty from fallen pine needles and sweat, and it sticks to your skin, blows through your hair, and cuts through the bite of the sun with a bloody metallic shine. I’m sitting on the couch. It’s about 11 a.m. Next to me, the dog pants. My neck is sore for no reason. I tilt my head tenatively, a hand on my collarbones, feeling for the ache. It’s nice, after a while, pulling like a stretch in the morning.

Loneliness also finds me like an old friend. There’s a certain type of loneliness that you can only achieve on a summer day and some Sundays. It’s slow, inelegant but silky-smooth, lazy and child-like in it’s mundanity. It sticks with you like the words ‘for now’.

A delivery man comes into the yard and leaves, not noticing the dog or I.

A grocery-store sort of feeling. Alone in a crowd, united by the common goal of survival. Fluorescent.

My hair is still blue and purple, albeit faded. It’s a bitch to get out, as it turns out. I went to the salon for a consultation, and even though it’s semi-permanent dye, they told me they probably couldn’t get it out all the way.

I’m dying it red and then back to my natural brunette soon. Maybe I’ll do the red today, if I get the time. In the back of my mind, I think about the family friends I’ll be spending the next weekend with (the rich ones— designer swimsuits, casual classism, tanned and sun-bleached to an inch of their lives). I know I visually fit in with them, aside from the dyed hair and the sunburn across the top of my tits. I just don’t know if I want to.

There it is— this odd vanity. I try to get rid of it as much as I can, but there’s still a desire to stand out from all the others, stranger and more beautiful. I can do it, which doesn’t help. If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have the desire to, but I can and have, and I always want it. It’s terrible. I adjust my swimsuit top, trying to make the inevitable tanline better.

I’m reminded of how the Fourth of July is coming up. I ignore the uneasy pit in my stomach, and focus on the spider crawling across the top of my hand. It’s small. Black, but shining red in the parts that the sun touches. I don’t kill it. Slowly, slowly, it makes its way onto the back of the couch and disappears over the side. I watch it go.

Looking to my right, I notice my grandfather’s rose bush is blooming. I take the small joy for what it is, and I ignore the parts of his corpse we buried under it— his hands, some organs. There’s always a metaphorical dead body under a rosebush, isn’t there? The loneliness. Sometimes, you bury yourself under a rosebush.

I get off the couch suddenly. My movements surprise me these days. The dog, a scared, timid slip of a Belgian Malinois, slinks after me. Never wanting to be alone, she follows me up to my bedroom and watches me throw things into a backpack. We leave tomorrow for Oregon. The van is already packed.

Blindly, I dig through the clothes on the bed my sibling left behind when they left for college, grabbing anything wearable and somewhat clean. An old ballet leotard, the pair of denim shorts I patched together, jeans, a tanktop I cut the bottom six inches off, a t-shirt and a button down which were both my ex-boyfriend’s, my mother’s bright red college hoodie, the only swimsuit that fits me, my father’s old work jacket. I take some of it (jeans, hoodie, jacket, tanktop) out to wear in the car. The pile of clothes is small, and I don’t add to it. We’re there for about a week. I don’t need more.

(When my parents see my bag, they exchange a look. My father laughingly asks if I’m trying to be a monk. I say yes. I’m not joking. He throws my backpack into the car without another word.)

I dye my hair once my parents are asleep. They don’t even blink when I come downstairs the next morning with my hair colored a strange brown-red.

That afternoon, the sun is dragging itself down into the horizon, tinting the endless dome of blue sky golden. It's making the van even hotter, despite the windows being down. It's June 30th. My family and I are currently passing through eastern Washington. Surrounding us, windmills cut through the air, and I watch the white blades push through the air like its honey-- slow, subtle delay. Resistance. Like they don't want to succumb to gravity.

I'm thinking about the end of the world. It might have something to do with me listening to MCR's Danger Days-- because what else can you listen to hurtling almost 90 miles an hour through the plains in an old car that doesn't have AC-- but the apocalypse is never far from my mind these days.

It would take eight minutes and twenty seconds for us to die if the sun exploded. It would blink out of existence, and nothing would happen until the explosion rocked into us like a shockwave. On the other hand, if the ozone layer kept disappearing, the snow would melt and the oceans would rise and we'd only be safe in the mountains, but even then barely because of the heat.

Oh, sunshine. I think what I mean to say is that every piece of writing from the last two weeks begins with the apocalypse. I feel like it'll be the sun that gets us in the end.

About two hours into the drive, the van breaks down. Thankfully, the town we manage to drift into has a mechanic, but we're stuck there for a night as he tries to fix it. It's the alternator and some circuits in the dash— when it stops working, it stops charging the battery, and then the circuit break just makes the electrical not work. So here we are. My shadow stretches on forever.

When you imagine a small town in the USA, this is probably it. The highway runs right down the middle of the clapboard and brick buildings, the sun glaring down like an unforgiving god. We walk the dog through the neighborhood, full children playing in the yards, dancing in and out of the sprinklers. Some of those backyards have Trump 2024 flags. Almost all of them have an American flag, but that might be due to the Fourth of July being this weekend.

Men in trucks watch me as they drive by.

In the motel lobby, there's stacks of Gospel pamphlets with titles like "Free from Fear" and "Why Must I Suffer?", and I dig through them, grabbing the ones that preach about everyone being inherently evil or want to leave justice up to God. I think about the old man who runs the sausage store down the street who was so eager to tell me about his dozen grandkids and asked me what sports I do. I think about how delighted he was when I said ballet. The people that stopped us to ask if the dog was a Belgian Malinois, and than told us about their dog at home. The two old ladies who asked if I had to strip my natural color out to get my hair that color.

How could you ever believe that people inherently want to do bad things? How could you ever believe that everyone is a bad person? How could you ever believe that God would give you free will and then save you?

We spend the night there. In the morning, we drive the van back home, a two hour journey that it barely makes. It needs more time to be fixed completely, so we throw our things into our other car and head out again.

Oregon is the same as it ever was. When I look too hard at its corners, I could peel it right back to 2009. The barley field ripples up a hill. The rope swing has the same shitty plastic seat it’s had since it was installed. The forest, bordering the main property, looms large. The entire place is green and filled with light, and the cherry trees smell as sweet as ever.

What do you call a place that stays the exact same and lets everything change around it? A rock in the river, the eye of a hurricane, maybe. The teenage boys running amok around the property look two sizes too big for it. Sometimes, I think that if I looked for her, I could find my eight-year-old self laughing in the trees, sun drunk and full of half-ripe apples.

Inside the tent, on top of my things, is a spider. This one is bigger, about the size of my little toenail, still a shining, bulbous black. I carry it outside and watch it vanish into the grass.

I think about the sausage man. I think about him waving at us as we drove away for the last time, him watching us slowly get smaller and smaller. I think about the van, old and a product of sentimentality.

My bedroom, back at home, is a harbor for broken things. Old and useless, we sit in the disquiet of the city together, watching the world move around us. Thrifted teddies with missing eyes. Glued-together ceramics. Rusted candelbras. Crumpled-up reciepts taped to the wall, older than me, found in the crumpled-up and water-swollen books I find on sidewalks.

I think about leaving things behind permanently, and find that I can’t. Maybe it’s because of life being in a constant state of impermanence, of nothing staying forever and therefore nothing leaving forever. Maybe it’s because whenever I leave, I’ve always been able to come back.

11 year old girls call me over to play volleyball with them, and I go. I win, purely through height advantage, and then we run through the sprinklers together. Behind us, on the basketball court, the boys are watching. Out of the nine of them, I only know four of their names. It unsettles me, but I never ask, and they never tell.

The adults, when I see them, look at me like a broken doll. The anger I feel from it makes my stomach churn.

We stick together, me and the 11 year olds. There are older girls there, a few years younger than me, but they unsettle me more than the teenage boys. I can’t find any good reason to be wearing mascara and highlighter to a beach, or to take dozens of the same selfie, or to call something you don’t like “fat”. It scares and sickens me, their saccharine softness. So, me and the 11 year olds cling to each other, chlorine-soaked, hairy-legged, eating cherries and dodging everyone else like they’re cops, barking back at the dogs, screaming with laughter.

It goes like that for days. I wake up, I take my medication in the tent, I let the girls drag me around, we make mac and cheese for lunch, go swimming either in the river or the neighbor’s pool, play more, nap in the sun, eat dinner late, run, fall asleep. I teach them how to shoot a gun and swim completely underwater and catch frogs. They teach me how to yell so loud it echoes and where to find the best dirt for a mud bath and how to jumprope double dutch. It works. Sometimes, we’re thrown into a car with the rest of the kids to go into town. Sometimes, I don’t see adults until 8 p.m.

It’s the least alone I’ve been for months. I can’t decide if I like it or not.

It’s the 4th of July, 10 p.m. The sun has set. I’m walking around aimlessly, listening as the crickets and far-off fireworks sing unknowable songs to each other. I pass a particularly large oak, run my fingers over the bark, search for the intitals that I carved when I was 12. I find them after a while, along with one of the teenage boys, smoking. I don’t know his name, but I recognize him— he sticks out from the rest of them like a sore thumb, dark-eyed and buzzcutted, possessing a self-awareness the rest don’t have.

He looks at me. His eyes are pools in the night. “Hey,” he says. He’s got an accent. It suprises me.

“Hi,” I say. I sit down next to him.

“Happy Independence Day,” he says. Australian.

“Not really,” I reply, and he laughs.

“Not a happy day or not independent?” he asks.

“Both.”

“Cheers.” He grins and takes a drag. I forgot Australia also declared their independence from Britain. He motions the cigarette towards me, and I take it. Miraculously, I don’t cough. I hope it doesn’t fuck with my meds.

We sit in silence until the cigarette burns down. “Fucking hate fireworks,” he says.

“Fucking hate the Fourth,” I say. He looks at me.

“What?” I ask. Leaning over, he kisses me. He tastes like ash and the pork we ate for dinner.

“I don’t even know your name,” I say, but I kiss him back, and we stay liplocked until I hear one of the girls calling me. I dust the dirt off the seat of my jeans and leave. He pulls out another cigarette. When I run my hands though my hair, three spiders fall out. I smile at them and make plans with a bottle of shampoo.

I watch the girls play Roblox until they, one by one, fall asleep, iPads blinking off. I follow them, falling asleep in the tangle of their limbs, worming my way out of it around 1 a.m. to sneak back into my tent where the dog waits for me. I kiss her on the head, silently apologizing for not giving her enough attention, despite her sticking to me like a shadow for the whole weekend. I fall asleep for the second time in my jeans and jacket, curled around her.

I don’t see the boy again. I don’t know if I wanted to. We leave the morning of July 5th before 9 a.m., and I don’t say goodbye to anyone, choosing to sit in the car with the dog on my lap. It’s my half birthday. I’ll be a legal adult in 6 months. The thought makes me nauseous, so I turn up my headphones as loud as they’ll go and stare out the window. When we get home, I immediately go to my room, exhausted. There’s a spider on the windowsill, and in a sudden burst of anger, I crush it.

I spend the next two days in bed, sore and guilty and sick and tired, tearing down the reciepts and tossing the chipped ceramics into a bin to store at the back of my closet. I hang blankets over my windows to block out the sun. Denial. It’s the first time I’ve cried in months. I pretend it never happened. Nobody asks questions, and I fade out again. My parents can’t tell when I’m behind them anymore. The sound of my breathing haunts me, and I haunt the house with my shadow-dog.

When I sleep, the angels haunt me.