Tilt

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(It's part of the experience.)

_______

Your mother takes your blanket out of the laundry basket and puts it back on your bed. It’s pink and old and loved. She sits there, wondering what to say to you, the same way you are right now. Her eyelashes weigh heavy against her cheeks, so downturned recently. What about the sky? What about all of the people who come to meet with her? Just more looking at the floor, her hands, your photo on the table in the living room.

You want to tell her to do the laundry. After all, if she forgets that she is the one who took it out, then you’re the one who’s going to be stuck with her nagging.

Someone shifts downstairs. The floor creaks. A window opens. You feel all of it, even the hesitant gardenia scent of another candle freshly lit. Your favorite: you must’ve owned a dozen. All of these bodies in so little space. Some of them you haven’t seen in years. How do you greet familiar strangers? It’s much easier to wait there in your room with your mother until she does all the talking for you.

She plays with the edge of the blanket. Against her tan hand, the color looks even more worn out.

The world tilts before you can open your mouth, you with it—

and the window shuts 

behind you.

It should be cold outside tonight. You walk with your arms around yourself because you didn’t have time to grab your jacket in the rush. It’s always like this now, an endless coming-and-going, not knowing you’re on a train then suddenly you’re pushed onto a new station. Always when the words are almost to you, your voice hoarse and unspeakable. Six days of silence, now. You always come back home, though. You could let her know that—you are always returning home.

You pass another street lamp and it flickers, trying to make sense of your bodylessness, your missing shadow. The street cats follow you with their eyes, but they don’t come up to you anymore. To them, you are a breeze. You are a marker of passing time.

You miss when the soles of your shoes made noise.

It should be cold out tonight, you think again. It should be cold out tonight. Again, and again, and again as you hug yourself tighter, waiting for the temperature to shift against you. For the bare skin of your arms to feel bare. For your shoes to squeak against concrete after you walk through a puddle on purpose.

Someone’s dog barks from behind a fence. You know it has a name that starts with B, but like your own, that name is lost somewhere in the garden on the other side. There are a few things you got to keep: faces, your family, what you liked, what you didn’t like, the route to school and back. Your best friend kissing you during a sleepover, her lips slick with three-dollar lip gloss that tasted like peach.

Maybe it’s her house you’re walking by. Four days ago, you would have known it was her house. You might have even stopped, trying to climb the fence and failing, your palms slipping off the metal like rain. You just want her name back. You want your mother’s name back, and dad’s. Maybe an uncle or aunt’s. 

Your own matters less. People keep repeating it, over and over, so often that you’re tired of it.

If all goes as it has, then by the time they take your photo off the table and put it back on the wall, another one among a dozen, you might begin to ask yourself whose house you're in. Can you forget your own face? The mirror doesn’t house you.

That felt good, at first. You don’t think you would want to see what you look like. Something took you—whatever state it gave you back, you’re okay not knowing. 

The whirring kicks up again. Low static at the back of your mind, growing into a hum and then a headache until your whole body buzzes like static. Someone calls for the dog, the sound eaten before you can make sense of it. You’re alone again. Each step is a little lighter, a little less defined, and you tilt again, and tilt, seeing dirt and rocks and someone else’s eyes as you pass each other by in the crossing-onward, a gentle tilt,

and you’re at the gas station. Blue lights from inside, more whirring from the drinking machines, someone buying a pack of smokes. Your dad’s eyes are red when he walks to your car, a smattering of stickers covering the back window. As he sits in the driver’s seat, one hand grasping a lit cigarette and the other on the steering wheel, you believe that he sees you. You tell yourself this is the truth, that he is not peering at his own reflection in the window and not seeing his own eyes, but yours. He must see you everywhere in himself, now. Even more so than before. He turns his gaze to the road, away from you, and rolls the window down. Tilt.

You’re in an old classroom. Your middle school, maybe, the way it looked years ago. Plastic, gray chairs. A child leaning over one desk, scribbling on it with a pencil. You walk up behind her, close enough to see your handwriting tracing her letters, you realize it’s your best friend. She used to want to write her last name with the same cursive As that you did. Ones that look particularly fancy and grown. Your own voice from the hallway calls for her, and she goes running, leaving the window open so that the homework on your desk sweeps onto the floor, and you do too. Tilt.

You’re next to me. I’m sorry, but this isn’t the place to be, either. You’ll be back here when the time is right, and we can listen to the rain together. But not now. All these words and no verbs for you to make use of except for this one: tilt. 

Not a garden but close. Your grandparents’ summer house, ripe with sun and June. Someone who sounds like your mother laughs from inside, and the door swings open. She has cut her hair—when did it begin to streak gray? Like the silver ring on her finger she wears to this day, some day, a day far beyond you. You know time has passed, but time is a stranger to you now. It won’t tell you where it has been or where it is going, even as you stumble after it. Your father’s silhouette moves in the hallway, following her the way you chase what is not a memory. Long grass tickles your shins, the sun leaning against your back and neck without offering anything but light, and even the light does not take to you. It leans and leans, through and through. When you stand by the white, plastic outdoor table in hopes your mom will offer you a cup of coffee, you think she looks at you, mouthing:

tilt. And you do, you do. You tilt, and you see other eyes, hear other names that other passerbyers are tired of. You see a real garden, with sunflowers and honeybees. This was your house, lights in the hallway clicking on and off. It is fall and you watch everything vanish into the earth, taking you with it, slowly slowly

tilting, slip through the front door that is ajar, ignoring the date on the calendar strung to the wall on your right that was never there before, your photo next to it, ignoring the red circle around the day you won’t let yourself remember and forget,

tilting, until you are standing in your bedroom, again.

There’s your blanket on the bed. It has been washed.

You touch your clothes in the opened wardrobe, lingering on the college hoodie with the tag on. When you tug on the sleeve, it almost comes off, rattling on the hanger. 

Open curtains allow the sun to snag on the dust particles. For a moment, you feel not so different from all of those scattered pieces.

There’s that scent of gardenia again, only that comes more in the shape of a sound. It is tan fingers moving up your arm and into an embrace. It is your mother’s hair against your cheek. Your father’s poetry books fresh out of a box. That one campfire that shook almost too violently on the only road trip you ever took. It burns, and burns, and your mother lets go of you. Your father loves you, and he lets you go, too. Your best friend loves you—for you, it will always be present. She marries someone she will love just as much, and the thought does not ache you. The flowers in the garden wilt and sprout for you; some of them remain in the soil forever.

You love your name, the one you’re hiding from, and you let it go. I take it from you, like I do all the others, and I place it in a great river of other words that mean just as much and as little. You pause before watching it flood into water, tangle into adjectives, a noun. Laughter pearls from downstairs, plucked from the same great river you are walking into, believing you will find things just as beautiful and temporary inside of it. I hold you there. You are dust particles in the air, and honeybees and regrets, and years from now, someone else will remember you as they tilt, tilt, tilt into the next part of the world, where you will wait for them.

You know it is alright that you’re gone,

and you go.