weird boy//white claw

someone shaved the ends off of my world.

words have been living inside me with no room to breathe. crammed in cubbies and tucked into loaned library pages.

my anatomy & my desire are changing at every moment. the ideas are mine and then they are not. they belong to a moment; the one with the pink champagne, the one where the sun still rode in the clouds, the one where i was a pool of energy and not melting.

weird boy white claw is a story i thought to write last night in the dark as i went to sleep. it was abnormally early, 9 or something. i laid in the dark and couldn’t sleep, but i wrote. i wrote in my mind only, thinking ‘i will either get up or i will write this tomorrow’. i spend a lot of nights in this bedroom and i can’t decide if it is sweet or sad. it is probably both. it felt different earlier, like an open door, a possibility presented on napkin paper.

I did something stupid when I took the wrong people to the right places. I am sort of like one of those nightmarish boys who takes all his girls to the same restaurant and says the same things and puts on the same shitty tv show. I can think of a place, for example the meditation gardens, and I watch the memories spill into each other and share color. I like to bring people places where I am safe to escape. Safe to wander out of my body and into the space I know by heart; the past, the park, somewhere with asphalt.

Sof took me to the gardens for the first time when we were fourteen. She showed me the koi pond and we wrote notes for the wishing tree. She told me how her mom took her there on one of her worst days. It seemed like no one knew about it but us. It became the place I went when nothing made sense.

It was a friday past 9 when I drove my car the five minutes it took to the gardens. I was meeting a boy with a name starting with C. The gardens seemed like a safe place to meet. Close to home, familiar, sacred in the sense that nothing too awful could happen. I must have been seventeen, naive, and he, probably twenty. He was a stranger I had met on bumble, and I cannot explain to you why I decided to see him. I had an affinity for doing things that made no sense but would now be referred to as ‘for the plot’. For me it was for the portal.

I met C in the parking lot and I took him to my favorite spot under three huge trees. He came in fitted pants that flared at the bottom and some sort of girlish hat. We didn’t have much to say from the start. There was nothing to talk about. He brought a box of white claws, which I thought signaled poor taste. I remember what I wanted. It was the same thing I was always wanting; except I had wrapped it in darkness and given it a boy to hide behind. We sat on the grass under the moon and I stared up at the trees and longed for something more. I was a teenage girl waiting for something to happen. I wanted someone to speak to the silence. I wanted someone to merge worlds with, to say ‘what do you think this means’ to. To open a portal with me and follow it.

He downed white claws at an abnormal pace while I looked off into the distance hazily; there was nothing but dead air between us. I could feel the earth and all of its meaning slip away beneath me. At some point he kissed me and he wasn’t good at it but there was nothing else to do. I could feel the smooth buds of his teeth and the way his lips grabbed at something I didn’t seem to have. He began to touch me and I let him. I looked at the trees and sky with full moon eyes. I felt the portal become ash of something that had never burned. I felt displaced. Like this was my body but right then it wasn’t and I would just let it pass. It was ok. My gazing grew into grief. I thought of the portal, if there would ever be someone who could bridge the gap and feel the world with me, who could take me where i wanted to go. There is a door I am waiting to walk through. will you go with me?

At some point I said I should go home and C went to his car to wait the white claws out and I drove away and woke feeling like a stranger. I don’t know what I thought about it all. I wrote a poem and I think I used the word ‘alien’. Limbs and dirt and earth in my hair.

I never spoke to C again.

-

Two years later, I brought my boyfriend to the gardens to initiate the first out of three breakup conversations. We sat in the same withering grass and I thought only of my alien body. I had forgotten the portal. J had bulging brown eyes and everything else in my world disappeared in his presence. He filled every corner and crevice of the rooms in my mind and my body became a foreign object; I would spend months trying to scrub my skin just to make it feel mine again.

We both cried under the golden sun and I laid my head in his lap and curled up like a small dog. He told me to stop it but I was evil and indecisive and he was something when there was nothing.

We cancelled the breakup and drove to my house to drink tequila instead.

-
Another two years passed: I had half-remembered the portal, realized how lost and displaced I was whilst stumbling through uni, and moved home. I worked in a Starbucks inside a Hilton and decided the luggage boy would be my next doorway to walk through. He was a happy escape from coffee orders that made me lose faith in humanity. S was a (not famous) sound-cloud rapper who doodled drawings for me while staring from across the room. I fell ill with obsession. After months of debating if he liked me, I took him to the gardens. It was early Autumn and mosquitoes bit at our ankles. He wanted to sit in the car instead. We drove to the liquor store and I asked him to get me something sweet. He came back with whiskey.

The door closed and I watched it. Each time I saw a portal it disappeared upon contact. My want was helpless and misguided.

⃝ ⃝ ⃝ ⃝

There have been many moments since then where I’ve felt the world open up like a throbbing star before me. Glimpses of heaven. The illusion of infinity. I reach out with my fingers crossed and hope it won’t disintegrate at my feet.

Teenage girls are born waiting for something to happen and I was born searching for something I couldn’t name. I can trace back through the years and see all of the almosts’ like twinkling stars. People and places and things I swore held something impenetrable and eternal. I have not stopped looking for miracles.

But I’ve stopped taking people to the gardens; I’ve stopped going there at all. I moved to the other side of the Atlantic and the gardens went on breathing without me. Maybe they are cradling other girls. Maybe the boys I took there go back and sit under the trees. Maybe someone found heaven there, after me.

Maybe the next girl who lays on the withering grass will find a portal, or maybe she’ll end up like me.

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