Mebby by Colleen T.

We have taken our fears and strung them through with red strings, and looped them around our necks together.

We have pulled flowers from dirt and shaken them and smoothed out ruffled petals together, coloring them in with old crayons and creating something beautiful.

We have, together, been shoved in the corners of people’s minds along with the subconscious like how they need to buy milk this Tuesday, and the regret they still feel when they see a dead squirrel along the side of the road.

I have written down on napkins everything I hate and everything I love, and all of my half-formed, awkward philosophies I have printed on the bottoms of my shoes, and presented it all to you in a cardboard box, tied up with my perpetual confusion, and you have accepted it.

We have come a long way, you and I. I am no longer the weak, underexposed child who sank into that plush red chair, trying to get my hair to cover my face, so no one could see that I was about to cry. The people we know and the people we don’t know are no longer the people who passed by me, uttering a half-hearted “you okay?” and leaving the moment I mustered out a choked “fine”. You, yourself, are no longer the girl who didn’t leave after most figured their duty to their fellow man had been completed. You are no longer the girl who sat by and worked through my bumbling sentences and fat tears to understand.

I had not talked to you before that, but suddenly, you had become my life line. And so I clung to you, and, to my luck, you who are no longer the you you once were did not abandon me, and, for that, I am indebted to you for forever and a half.

We have become something of a pair, a disjointed partnership. The energy I force upon you, with my shrieks and my smiles and my obnoxious laughter, is tenuously balanced out by your never-failing composure and your grace and the sound of you saying my name like a mother would scold a child.

We have taken the wire they cut clay with, and cut ourselves into delicate chunks, and shared one another with one another as we try to get a feel for another human being, another piece of support. I have watched you fall apart and grow again, as you have witnessed my taped-together serenity shatter without notice. I have seen you become who you are, and I hope desperately to see who you become and who you will be and if you will rescue any other girls sinking into a plush red chair that defines themselves. I hope you are happy, and I hope you are smiling when you die. And I hope I die before you, because summing you up in a eulogy would be impossible, and, as you know, I don’t handle that sort of pressure with any semblance of poise.

So here’s to you, Mebby. Here is my heart and my soul and my flesh and the blood that slips about underneath it all. Here is me, not the same me you rescued, but me nonetheless. And I think of all it took to bring us together, and I thank the God we both occasionally believe in for tears.