swill swill

1/64th of a memoir

        We took off everything except our socks.  We made up that we were traveling a long distance together.
        “Where should we go?”  I asked.
        “It doesn’t matter,” he said.  “We can make a map.”
        On my left knee, he found Paris with his fingertips.  He traced a freckle and it was the Louvre or the Champs d’Elysees or the Tower; moving further South, towards my calf – that dot there? – Morocco.
        My left index finger was Hong Kong; my right, Belarus.
        In your hips, he said, there are the hiccupping beats of Algerian Rai; there is the crush of Saharan sand; there are the pounces of Ghana.
        He said:  Your throat is Etruscan clay.
        He said:  Your spine, the neon vertebrae of street signs in Tokyo at dusk.
        He said:  You are the world to me.  See?
        Sometimes he talked about marriage; he wrote me proposals on college-rule notebook paper and folded them in perfectly square origami pockets.  He delivered them to me in the hallway between first and second period; I’d rush to the bathroom in the middle of Algebra to decipher his notes, scrawled in blue ink cursive.  They all said, “I have dreamed about you.”  His brown eyes were two overflowing mugs of dark wine; I drank them up and my head spun and I wrote back:  “Okay.”
        I was fourteen, then.

—Elle O’Brien 2009