babyhead

I hadn't quite figured anything out yet. I had just turned eleven, and school would be starting in a couple weeks.

I would soon start having trouble sleeping through the night. My legs would ache in their centers, enough to wake me from a dead sleep. My parents would tell me this was normal, and give me two aspirin.

I walked around, one afternoon, in the August heat, flushed, and damp on the back of the neck.

There was a bodily pressing that had begun. I could feel it hot behind my cheeks, and on the tops of my ears, in my fingertips and deep in my belly.

It came in turns, and fits.

None did it matter if I had run myself out in the woods, the streets, read my fill, or if I had eaten dinner. The pressing came, made me sweaty, and nervous.

In someway, it was connected to the vague idea that a woman at the age of twenty-eight was precision, that I recently dreamt of making out, in a milky darkness, with a girl who slid and touched the inside of my mouth with a tongue tip made of a strawberry (The image stuck with me.), It was somehow linked to the way the petals that fell from the roses my grandfather cut for my grandmother and left on the kitchen table, and felt against my mouth. They were close to something, that I wanted to push against, that I wanted against my skin, and face, but not quite right. It vaguely referenced how my cousins newly shaven legs felt, against the back of my neck, as I lay against them and read A Wrinkle in Time out loud to her on the rough lawn.

There was the smell of lipstick.

There was the deep, pervasive, and foreign scent in the bedding of my best friend's older sister. As, I laid on her unmade bed, in the dark, in the middle of the afternoon, while she was at work, and her brother rifled through her room, looking for cigarettes and money, as the cicadas hummed outside, as the drawn shade clicked softly back and forth in the breeze.

I wanted to push against something.

I wanted to see a nipple grow straight.

I wanted to lick my finger wet, and touch it in rounds.

There was something in the movement of their hands as a glass was passed, or in the arms as a window was opened.

There was something in how a woman climbed the stairs, or the cadence in their laugh that suggested something I couldn't quite figure out, said something, of places I wanted to push against.

I walked around my bedroom, in the afternoon, in the August heat, flushed, and damp on the back of the neck.

All these things were transparent and overlapping in my little head,

and I hadn't quite figured anything out yet.

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