velocity girl

infinite gray, selkies, and freezing cold lakes

My mother returns to the house in a flurry of layers with the sort of hastiness that only comes with unpleasant weather and groceries that need to be brought in from the car. The dog wraps around her legs, letting out a whine.

The cold is coming in through the open door.

Everything I see these days comes in at 10 frames per second, slow shutterspeed motion blurs of shadow and slicks of brushed-on light that follow movement. My mother is a half dried oil painting in the doorway, blurry and smeared around the edges, fading in and out as she moves back and forth from the car to the kitchen. The paper bags are barely holding onto their soggy bottoms as the dog bumps them with her nose. The bulbs in the kitchen are almost as old as I am, loose filaments rattling and glowing amber, coloring everything in shades of gold and gray.

It’s gray everywhere, really. I don’t think I’ve seen actual sunshine since I came home from Oregon a week ago. The Pacific Northwest sky has an incredible ability to knit clouds together so tightly that the entire sky is the same shade of light gray, all of it shining in place of the sun. Sometimes when I wake up, I think I’m getting raptured. All that white light, all those rain puddle reflections— we’re the dullest, warmest things in the entire city. Cities like this are good at being cold, impersonal and gray all over. Everywhere, gray. Gray gray gray. Repetition begets insanity begets repetition, but insanity is justified here. I’ve been all over the western half of the country, and I’ve never seen a city that’s this good at looking like a jail cell.

I’m sitting on the stairs, the door that leads to the kitchen half closed, watching the scene unfold. I haven’t been back at the house for what feels like forever, certainly not for this long at a time. Typically, I’d have crashed at someone’s place in a post-party fatigue by now, but not this week— I’ve only left the house to walk the dog and go to the convinience store for something to satisfy an ever-unsatisfied oral fixation. My parents aren’t used to it. Neither am I. It’s hard to not feel decontextualized.

This must be how kids feel when they come home from college. The disconnect. I can hardly find my way around the house in the dark anymore because my mother moved the couch the last time I was gone. I’m sure that I could make an effort to be more connected— sitting in the kitchen with everyone else instead of on the stairs, alone and in the dark, for example— but I don’t know if there’s a point to it. I’m going to keep leaving until I’m legally allowed to leave for good, and then I’m probably going to end up dead on the side of a highway somewhere. Disconnection is permanent, as far as I’m concerned. I missed my chance.

It’s only noon, but it feels like it’s 8 p.m. My parents are talking in the kitchen, something about having to throw away an entire bag of carrots, about November’s lighting bill. Adult stuff. I’ll be an adult in under three weeks. I can feel a migraine building in my temples, and I pinch the bridge of my nose like that’ll do something. Magical thinking, again. I don’t know why I only use magical thinking for the tiny things— people dear to me die and I move on suprisingly fast, not even wishing they were alive again, but I can’t handle a headache without some form of prayer.

Two options: I’m a sociopath and a future serial killer, or I just have good coping mechanisms. When I ask God which one it is, He’s busy playing Candy Crush. He doesn’t care about whatever moral dilemma I’ve forced myself into. Whatever, whatever, whatever. Do you think everything echoes in me like that because I’m empty?

My father yells my name up the stairs, looking right past me. I’ve never felt more like a ghost, not even when I have dreams that I’m trapped in my own decaying corpse. He didn’t even see me. I was right there, and he didn’t even see me.

Get over it, my brain echoes, and I get over it. What else is there for me to do?

---

“When you have babies, I’m going to be much better about the holidays than my mother was,” my mother says to me, out of the blue. She’s putting ornaments on the Christmas tree with a practiced ease while I sit on the couch and stitch up the holes in a sweater I found on the ground. Distantly, I wonder why we use evergreens for Christmas trees. Surely Jesus was’t crucified on pine planks— it must have been carried over from the Pagan traditions.

“What if I don’t have children?” I ask. She plugs in the lights on the trees, and I wait as my bones get used to the new influx of electricity.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she says. I hate being called sweetheart. “You’re going to need to let somebody love you, eventually.”

Pause.

“I wouldn’t have a kid just so someone would love me,” I say. I don’t think I’ve ever loved someone just because I’m supposed to— my love is something people earn. I don’t think my mother ever tried.

“Well, why do you think you were born?” she asks, and then flits away to put the spare string of lights in a potted plant. The song changes, and her face brightens. “I used to play this on my clarinet in high school. For the Christmas Pageants.”

I don’t say anything, not even when I accidentally stab myself with the needle. I just sit there and watch the blood well, looking at my mother and then at my finger again and again. We have the same hands. Sometimes, I think that if I poked myself hard enough, I could make her bleed.

“I used to be like you,” she says. “I used to fuck my way through the country, too. I was engaged three times before I met your father.” Pause. “You know that story about the selkies, what happens when someone takes their fur?”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes, I think your father took my fur.” Pause. “You and I are very similar, you know.”

“I know.”

“Maybe you’ll finally understand me if someone takes your fur.” I do understand her, actually, and that’s precisely the problem. I stopped seeing her as my mother when I started seeing her as a person.

“I don’t want someone to take my fur,” I say. The needle moves in and out, my hands covered in silt from the dirt on the sweater.

“I didn’t either, you know.”

“I know,” I say, and when she leaves to put a pot roast in the oven, I stay in the basement, putting tiny stitches into the sweater until it becomes mindless, running on muscle memory alone.

---

I’m lying on my back in the hallway, petting the dog and watching my mother straighten her hair. I got my hair from her— wavy, thick, the kind of mousy brown that goes blonde if you spend time in the sun. The only difference is that hers is down to her waist, and I won’t let my hair grow out past my shoulder blades until I move out. I don’t want to look like her. My father mixes us up enough as it is.

She’s all dressed up, about to go to another holiday party. I watch as she adjusts her tie in the mirror, pouting her lips and widening her eyes like she’s still a teenager in Alaska.

The dog huffs, shifting under my hand. I can smell how she burnt her hair, can hear my father breathing in the living room as he waits for her to finish putting on mascara. I shuffle out of the hallway and flop onto the couch, and he grunts a greeting.

She leaves the bathroom and puts on her platform heels, grabbing her purse. “Ready,” she says. “I just need to find my lip gloss.” My father looks at her, eyes fond.

“She looks like a poetry professor at a women’s college,” I say.

He snorts. “D’you think I should wear my green vest, so it looks like she’s a military wife that stays at her best friend’s house whenever I’m deployed?”

“Oh, she’s absolutely dykeing it up while you’re on tour,” I say. “She’s having sweet, hot lesbian sex while you’re in the trenches.”

“We all use different weapons, Lee,” he says, barely straight-faced. “I’d be using a gun, she’d be using scissors.”

I laugh so hard I cough. My mother, in the kitchen, is still looking for her lip gloss.

“I miss you, kiddo,” he says quietly. “You should come home more often. You’ve got your entire life to be out of the house.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, maybe.” I miss him too, but not enough to stay home. He’s not taking my fur.

They leave, locking the door behind them. My skin is starting to itch. I’ve been inside for too long, in one place for too long. I need to go to the ocean, to the water. I want to go swimming and it’s no fun to break into the local pool by myself.

This is your own fault. You wanted to get out of the scene. Look at what you’ve done to yourself.

How many of us on the scene have ended up dead or dying? Overdoses, stupid decisions, hitchhiking gone wrong, beat up in conservative towns. I’ve seen my friends in hospitals more than I’ve seen them in their bedrooms. We could get seriously fucked up, doing what we do. I’ve been in cars with men that would have hurt me if I wasn’t armed.

It’s not safe. I could die doing this, but even if it kills me, this is what I love. It comes down to if I want to live or not.

Oh, it should be an easy choice. It should be easy.

---

I get called out to a party the next day. It’s an hour away from the city, at someone’s lake house. Nobody’s planning on going swimming, but when Grace comes to pick me up, they have towels thrown in the backseat anyways.

“It’s Joe’s house,” they explain, face rhythmically illuminated by the passing streetlights. “Who fuckin’ knows if he’s got anything but booze in there.”

Grace is one of my favorite people in the world, if I’m being honest. They’re big, muscled to hell from rowing and over 6 feet tall, and they don’t take shit from anyone. It’s rare that I find someone who will gladly tell me to shut the fuck up, and I love them for it. They’re one of the only people that can pull me out of my head when I start going down rabbit holes.

(It makes me so sad, sometimes. This crowd worships the kind of nonsensical intelligence I have when I’m on the brink of a spiral, using big words and obscure references to talk about shit that doesn’t matter. Everyone else feeds into it, but Grace will put a hand on the back of my neck and ask me if I want some water, then drive me home and tell me to use words they understand.)

They drive fast, and we reach the lakehouse in record time. Inside the house, old jazz is playing so loudly that I can hardly hear them asking me if I want a drink. I shake my head. If I’m back on the scene again, I’m not going to make it easier for me to be a fucking idiot about it. No hospitals tonight, no hospitals ever again. I hate needles. Fear fear fear in an insane city.

Lydia is at this party, but her twin brother is nowhere in sight. It suits me just fine, and we head out to the dock to try and mooch cigarettes off of some boy that thinks he’ll get laid for his trouble.

We sit in silence, wrapped in thick coats and scarves, leaning against each other like bookends. I tuck my knees under my jacket and watch the moonlight shine on the water.

“Sometimes I think I made you up,” I say. “Or that you’re a ghost. Maybe an angel. Something that haunts me whenever I go near water.”

“Like I’m the thematic representation for water,” she says, breath pluming into the air.

“Yeah.” Pause. She ashes her cigarette into the lake.

“I think the same thing about you sometimes,” she says. “Life could be a dream that I’m dreaming, and I could’ve made you up to fufill some sort of… desire. For understanding. You started talking to me because you understood me.”

An anonymous poem of hers was floating around the scene before we started talking outside of family friend obligations. I vowed to find her because I thought she understood me, and just like that, we had understanding and vulnerability without much risk from either of us.

“Twin primes,” I say, taking off my scarf.

“What are you doing?” she asks, watching me unzip my coat and step out of my dress.

“Push me.” I’m standing on the dock in my underwear, arms extended like I’m on the cross. (I imagine my prayer card— eyes skywards, arms outstretched, chest ripped open to expose a frozen blue heart. O God, You who bestowed upon a poor childe the blessings of mercy and grace, we beseech You to bless us with the same. We invoke her patronage to guide our souls through the hot and dark nights, to cool our foreheads in sickness, to calm us in times of trouble. Hallowed be her name.)

“What?” Her face and hair are white in the moonlight.

“Push me,” I say again. She places a hand on my bare chest and shoves me backwards, into the black water. It’s freezing. When I open my eyes, still underwater, the entire world is in black and white. I could stay forever, but no. I have to live. I have to want to live, and I do, I really do. Even if it kills me, life is what I love.

I come up for air and pull myself onto the dock. “Thanks,” I say. My teeth are chattering, and I’m sure my smile is verging on manic.

“What was that about?” she asks, wiping water off of my numb skin.

“All doors are open to the believer.” I laugh until I can’t breathe. Lydia just looks at me.

“Maybe we should both leave the scene,” she says, handing me my coat. “Just go and disappear. Go to college somewhere warm and untouchable.”

“If there was a nuclear fallout, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than in a bunker with you,” I say. She smiles at me, and I smile back.

“Alright, inside. I don’t want you to die,” she says.

“Me neither,” I say, and I mean it. It’s so nice to mean it.