5. you can paint your nails lime green, rent yourself a limousine
I go to Jackson before I go to the library. He says I don’t sound fine, and not to focus on the march to the sea. We will not go “two by two”. I put a flower in my hair. I check on Bailey. I know what voices sound like.
When I was a kid, when I was trying to fall asleep in bed I’d try and imagine everyone’s faces and sometimes I could not. Sometimes I couldn’t remember what an aunt or a cousin or a friend looked like and I’d have to get out of bed and look at a picture or I wouldn’t be able to sleep. It’s not like that anymore. I forgot about faces a long time ago. I don’t even try. Its voices now. I remember everyone’s voice. I can hear you ten miles away. I don’t remember anyone’s face, nobody’s name, but goddamn do I know a voice.
I treat the phone like my best friend, like my favorite enemy. Something to stare at. I put it in the dresser drawer. I interrupt Jackson’s sentences because I am trying to get him to tell me something but then I don’t remember what his voice sounds like. I want to call Bailey but I don’t want to hear breathing in the background. I know what this sounds like.
I get a voicemail or two, some over privileged Connecticut fuck, some overdone free for all. Hey, anyone that wants to can go on and say “look, she was really young, she didn’t understand what life was like”
and fine fair enough baby, I am bleeding out on the bathroom floor. I can tell you all about what it feels like when your cervix decides to change it’s mind, figures it will close back up. But hey, you have a fever. You took some cold medicine. You can’t pick up. And you have no voice, a face maybe. But I don’t know what you’re supposed to sound like.
My friends on the phone— Ilana in Seattle and she describes it well and Alex is in Portland and he swears there’s a porch swing and I can’t believe it. And poor Bailey, Christ, I can hear Bailey breathing because I spent years and years breathing in Clearwater, Florida. And out of the blue everyone is talking to me about me.
They’re telling me I sound like Ohio, everyone says all of a sudden I sound like Ohio. I don’t hear it— the Ohio. But I know my own voice. When I was a kid, along with the pictures of everyone else’s faces. I’d listen to my own voice for hours.
Now the albums leak and I always like it better live. They make the documentary about a movie and he says that I don’t sound fine. He says to focus on the legacy, not the man.
And when it comes to that well, me— I should do just fine.
