With a Smile, Girl

The weekend stows itself in a hundred moving boxes. The weather is hot, humid, the moment before thunder but it never arrives, and the citizens of the mid-size Swedish town spread their undressed bodies on the lawns and parks and beaches of its land. They all look the same, middle aged mothers with practical hairdos and their smiles upside down, the thin, browned girls of identical dress, the obnoxious men who never left and live loudly on former glories. I abhor meeting a single pair of eyes, for fear of recognition, but the years have been amassed, and I escape the past again. We biked across the old stone bridge as the sun set in fiery hues, and the river looked like black lava curling in around itself as it danced toward the lake, toward the sea, toward the inescapable cycle of its life and I wanted nothing more than to dive in and not resurface until the ice came.

I don't know that we need it, she says amidst ikea instructions and half-filled cabinets, but I do love to move in somewhere new. Her blood runs in my veins and burns my skin, I rejoice almost as much in this move as were it my own. The storaged version of my own past lies safely tucked into their basement room; it screams at me of the life I one had and what it is I think I am doing. I spend the night at a friend's; we kneel in the strawberry patch, tearing out weeds and searing our necks in the sunshine. I imagine I might want this, I think to myself but the thought tastes bitter and sticks in my throat. I'm beginning to see this trait not so much as an exotic quirk as a disease. 

The thing about roller coasters 

Is once you're on

How hard it is to step off.