Dashiel Tao Harris writes about the first time she kissed a boy in this valedictory to childhood, but what may be most striking about her post is its focus on her friendship with another girl who’s becoming a woman too. American lit has often been stuck on amity between boys-to-men. It’s past time for young women to take their friendships to the page…
Do you remember when you asked me to marry you? Your soft, little hand held mine as we walked up the stairs. Time seemed to slow just for us, everyone else rushing by, making a swishing sea of navy pleats. You proposed a plan for us to be together forever. We were only seven then, but I think we were fully alive to the existence of time. The only difference is that, in the stairwell, we thought we could tame it. We planned to move to Scotland because your older brother once told you that girls could marry there. This way we could be bound forever, never in fear of being apart.
I only remember our plan when it’s late at night and I can’t fall asleep, rendering Scotland more like a dream than a memory. Now it feels like we’re on stairs to an edge that everyone says we must step off from alone. A step that leads to a place that may be light or dark. I can’t tell but I want it to be like when we walked through Central Park along the 65th St. transverse. Do you remember that? It was after school one damp Friday afternoon. It rained so hard the transverse flooded and was closed off to cars. Since the M66 was nowhere to be found, we decided to shimmy past the barriers and make our way to your house by way of the empty road. The rain had left the air feeling icy and I probably needed a warmer coat, but I could not care less. You played our favorite songs as we danced across the wet concrete. Before we passed under each bridge, we yelled out until we heard our little voices call back, as if to scare away the darkness that lived in the corners of each passage. I liked how if you stood in the middle of the road and squinted hard enough you could see life still rumbling along Central Park West. I liked how, if you were quiet enough, it felt like time stopped. In the transverse, the rest of the city, even the world, revolved around us. The cars whizzed on either side of the park and the chattering noise of life barely bubbled over the trees for us to hear. Just you and me, once again, with nothing to fear but the prospect of stepping into a muddy puddle.
xxxxx
Do you hope, as I do, that it will be just like that? Maybe it is something we already know. Wouldn’t it be better if everything in the future was already something we knew? That way we wouldn’t have to worry about each other. You’ve held my hand for this long, why let go right now? You see, our grip has grown stronger as we have matured. Our hands are starting to show signs of wear: the slow formation of stubborn calluses and the bloody, chewed-up hangnails that accompany the rapid beat of a nervous heart. I fear that when we let go, you won’t be there by my side anymore. Would it be too much to ask for us to just stay here a little longer?
Maybe it’s selfish to ask. But the thought of being all on my own makes me shiver. I don’t even know how we got here; I can’t tell if I ran or was dragged. All I know is that I have always been with you. I wish we could go back. I wish we could slip time the way we once believed we could. But, I’m aware that we have been dangling our feet over the edge for quite some time now; daring each other to stretch our toes further than the other, getting a glimpse of what our next step might look like. The chest-shattering cough that follows the puff of smoke and an impish smile. The fire that runs through the throat and down to the toes after a rebellious gulp. The burning sensation after bleach hits the skin, turning the scalp into a simmering hotplate. Reminders that our bodies are itching and sizzling. Reminders that we are furnaces full of kindling ready to spark. Like we are boiling kettles letting out a high-pitched whistle screaming: I am ready!
Like when I had my first kiss. It was a chilly October noon but my body blushed into a sweaty heat. And my heart raced so fast I think it could have powered a city. So fast that it probably left a burn on my rib cage. I had never been so physically close to someone, to explore an aperture of a person where others would never go. It was different than between you and me, I have never been so painstakingly aware of the heat that radiates from another person’s body. I was giddy because I’d been called beautiful. The edge, at the time, didn’t seem so steep or dark. But that kiss will always live with the chest-collapsing lesson that no matter how sweet the memory or how deeply someone has known you, some intimates are just not meant to stay in your life. I wish I could say that was the only lesson. But I feel like I am covered in a thousand burns, scabs, and rashes from what I have learned. Like what real regret and shame feel like: the consequences of lying to yourself or another. All those lessons that make your skin boil so that tears make a sizzling noise every time they roll down your face. The realization that I am completely vulnerable to the whims of people. How the hurtful words of others can be so disorienting you don’t know whether you want to unleash a violent firestorm on anyone who comes too close or tear off your hot itchy skin. Maybe it’s not a bad thing to stay right here, where it’s cool and calm.
Because I don’t want to learn any more of these chest-collapsing and skin-boiling lessons. I don’t like how much it hurts. I don’t like the fire that scorches my body every time I dare to push past the limit of what I know. I feel like someone has lit a small fire at the ends of my hair and it’s slowly ravaging my body. I hate how my face burns at every mistake. I hate how the fire circles my throat, blistering it to the point where I can’t speak. How the fire travels to my chest to collapse my ribs and suck the air from my lungs with every deep sob I take. How it turns every blemish and mark into lava pools. By the time the fire reaches the stomach and limbs, my body is numb. I am parched. I am struggling for a cool glass of water to douse this fire and bring me back to somewhere less torturous. I just wanna know why we must put ourselves through all of this agony.
xxxxx
I remember this one time when I had a terrible cough. My chest and lungs crackled and burned so much that I couldn’t fall asleep. Hearing my coughs pierce through the thick darkness, my godmother (where is she now?) came to my rescue, floating in on the light that peeked through the crack of the bedroom door. With one hand she rubbed teeth-chattering Vicks on my sizzling chest and, with the other, she rubbed my earlobe until I fell headfirst into the pillow. As I fell further and further into the bed, I swear I was transported somewhere else. Where the burning in my chest died into the warmth of a loving embrace. The bulwark darkness was now inviting, loosening my limbs and relaxing my mind. I wondered if that was what is like to lie inside my mother’s womb. Nothing compares to the warmth I felt that night. I think part of me has always been yearning to feel that warmth again. Sometimes, I think I can find it when I revisit my old memories of us right before I fall asleep.
I never told you this, but I had a dream about all of you. We stood on 91st and Central Park West. Our awkward pre-teen bodies were barely able to manage these pristine white high-heels we all wore along with short white dresses. We stood at the entrance of Central Park hand-in-hand when, all of a sudden, a starting pistol went off. We let go of each other without a second thought and raced into the park. Our goal was to get to the 92nd and Madison, to the red-bricked building with the blue door we call our middle school. But it was hard to run across the soft grass and bumpy terrain in our heels. Some of us fell and twisted our ankles, staining their heels blood-red. And then, suddenly, the ground grumbled and dark green monsters with large teeth and long long talons emerged from the depths of the park. They chased us, grabbing at our ankles and jumping on our backs, desperately trying to drag us under. Under the touch of one of these monsters, girls’ dresses would slowly turn red, too. The urgency to cross overtook any thought of helping one another. Finally, by any means necessary, whether we crawled, ran, or limped, we reached the other side of the park. Bloody, bruised, scraped, we clawed our way back to 92nd and Madison. A familiar warmth came over us as we changed into our old uniforms to celebrate. No one questioned why we had crossed the park in the first place. Nor did anyone speak up when our injuries seemed to just disappear. I still don’t know what that dream meant, but the more I revisit it, the scarier the heart-warming ending is compared to the dark green monsters.
xxxxx
Because on a certain level, the warmth I seek, no matter how comforting, is more harmful than I want to admit. If I sink further into that bed, that memory, where my godmother (where is she?) lulls me to sleep, I start to freefall through a dark pit. On the other side, I fall into another warm bed. However, this time, cold hands interrupt my warmth, holding my hips as if they don’t belong to me. They slowly travel up along the slight curves of my torso until they reach somewhere I never asked them to be. My heart beats slowly, pumping thick warm blood. This time, my body is not sizzling. The heat, kept alive by the kindling that lives in every part of my body, escapes me and travels to cold, unwanted hands. My body is left at a luke-warm temperature—smothered kindling doused in cool water and unable to spark.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately since watching a sequence in Kurosawa’s Dreams, where a group of mountain climbers is caught in a dark and cold blizzard on their trek back to camp across an icy tundra. The leader urges his team to push through their exhaustion, but they all succumb to the bone-chilling blizzard and lay down to rest. The leader is awakened by an angel-like figure who places cozy blankets on top of him. Her smile is too soothing as she says, “The snow is warm…Ice is hot.” At first, the man is tempted to stay under the blankets, fall asleep, and give up looking for their camp. But when he does try to get up, she pushes him down, smothering him in the warm blankets. After a struggle, the leader is finally able to throw her off. Just as her skirts whip back into the wind, the angel’s tender profile flashes into the face of an ice demon. Once the leader is free from the warm trap of the blankets, the blizzard wisps away, revealing the sunny peaks of snowy mountains. The leader excitedly urges his team to keep going when he catches the sight of their camp that seems to glow from the sunshine. The dream ends as the mountain climbers start to scramble their way to camp.
I’m thinking just now of an advisory in an article about hypothermia: “You are not dead until you are warm and dead.” I don’t recall the entire scientific explanation, but the adage teaches that hypothermia victims have the potential to be revived even if they appear to be dead. The article also cautioned that rewarming of a victim is a delicate process. If you bring the heat back in the wrong way, you may kill a body, which leaves me wondering. Is this warmth I seek the death of me or the camp at the top of the mountain?
xxxxx
As we stand at the edge pondering our choices, I can feel the nippy wind whip around us and sting our open skin. Until now, I’ve preferred the comfort of a warm blanket, your calming hand, my godmother’s soothing ear rub…Looking backward is normal, especially now as we must face the wind. I was, and sometimes still am, afraid of the cold. The chill that comes with the growing distance from your childhood. Sometimes it seems like we are standing at the peak of a mountain in the middle of a snowstorm. The wind feels harsh and more like fire than ice. Instinct tells us to do what we would do when we were younger, to run back home and ask our parents to make a steaming cup of dark hot chocolate. But if we keep retreating from the cold into the warmth, we will end up digging ourselves into a dark hole. The storm will still rage on above us, as we live passively—barely there in a 6ft deep underground burrow. You might as well have given yourself an engraved marble tombstone while you are at it: Here lies the dead and warm body who lived in the past.
Even though we are unable to tame time as we believed in the stairwell, I bet we can still tame this heat. The key to reviving a hypothermia victim is to make sure that the person is evenly warmed internally and externally at similar rates. While we may indulge from time to time in memory’s warm embraces, let’s not forget the kindling within us. The kindling that exists in every inch of our bodies, that sparks at every step and misstep we take, refusing to be damped down. If you view the fire as something external, you will surely be devoured by the flames. But, the way I see it, desire’s popping and crackling is actually the hint of a fire deep within us. Of course, we are not fireproof but just as it is death to burrow and hide, you can’t deny your flame. Death is passivity.
I tell you this before letting go because this does not mean we will create the wintry distance we fear. One of the only things that I remember from chemistry is that breaking a bond in an endothermic process. This means, rather than releasing heat, the products of a broken bond absorb the energy created and become hotter. Now that we’re about to separate—heading off to schools in faraway places, and pursuing different paths—I see the process as an endothermic one. Maybe the scary steps we take to grow up are just a series of endothermic reactions, helping spark us and grow our flaming bodies. Those reactions stoke the fire that will keep us alert and awake during our snowy tundra treks. If death is to be passive—retreating underground or snuffing your flame—life is to be active. So, I know I cannot ask you to stay right here. But, I do ask you to never stop feeding that fire. To never let those cold unwanted hands smother your heat. To never stop raging against the tepid and lukewarm. To never think that you are not capable of embodying the fire that grows from your gut and heart, that energizes your limbs, that leaps from your lungs to your mouth, and that lights those licking flames I see behind your eyes. Because if our campfires rage on through the snowstorm, we will find each other’s glow once again.