I’ll sign my pseudonym to your confession, echo expletives in overture, regretting the passing through birth canals, staging reenactments of the favourite, precious moments from the history of Hillside High: How they tore your dress in ribbons, keeping snippets as souvenirs, your weeks of toil on your mother’s machine all for fucking naught. And when your face broke out in acne, you’d said it was a case of hives, caused by the stress of obligations, that your father fell behind in clipping coupons, your brother caught on tape in tights your former friend forsook, that, and the rest of memorabilia, home to spiders making nests in all your letters penned to boys. Now no one writes by hand: tapping emojis on their phones
or clicking left on a plastic mouse, while those annoying ringtones clench your fists and badger your Spock-like ears,
hearing I just called
to say I love you on the cell of a passer-by, thinking Superstition would have been a better choice, something Stevie’s not ashamed to say he sang. You know I never thought you fat, that unibrow was a dumb-ass word from the kids rolling grass in the pit, near the schoolyard, while the principal turned his nose and feigned congestion. You cry that kindergarten was a kinder place, that cruelty, though innate, had yet to fruit and flower, still covered in inches of ice. Let’s go back to the monkey bars and hang upside-down while it snows, feeling flakes
melt on our faces as the blood goes rushing to our heads, suspending the law of gravity or pretending to the world that we can, on any given moment, without notice – deferring our death if we want to.
Andreas Gripp
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