Sarah Mills
Belonging
I was born in June, cried for the first six months, and then one cold day
it was like an icicle snapping. The resignation. The silence. As a child
I was afraid to throw confetti, couldn’t stop thinking about finding
all the pieces. When I graduated high school on a spring day I wondered
if my cap would make it back down from that blank canvas of sky
I hurled it into, worried I’d pick up someone else’s and be catapulted
into a life I hadn’t earned. Bad memories cling to me like heat rash.
There’s something about the cold, how sharp and unforgiving,
makes me forget there’s anything to be sad about. One New Year’s Eve,
my then-partner’s grandma handed me a stock pot and said bang this.
At midnight, we went wild drumming frying pans and colanders, dancing
into the night with our naked joy. It was the loveliest sound. Sweeter
than my final cry, or the silence of stones on the darkest day of the year
when it’s black at four in the afternoon and everything is so cold,
so quiet, and there’s nothing else to do but wait.
It’s Been Raining for Three Days, and Suddenly I Remember
that other life when you were mine and you gave me sweet, senseless
gifts—bird feathers you found on walks, foreign currency I’d never use,
beer caps you’d collected. We spent all of June swaying in a hammock
nestled between two oaks, watching shadows pulsate on the bright pages
of our favorite books. Each morning you’d peel the rind off an orange slowly,
slowly, so tender the way you’d remove my silk pajama blouse after breakfast,
zest-scented fingers fumbling with buttons, bodies quivering like we were
unfamiliar. And that evening on the back porch under a utopian sky
when you asked me what I wanted and I couldn’t answer, your face
crumpled like a discarded love letter. When you asked what I was hiding
and I said nothing, even though I’d cried through a beautiful poem that day
and kept it to myself. And now it’s just the rain, the rain, how it never stops,
and now I think I could answer—What do you want? What are you hiding?
The way I recite my answers in the mirror every morning like affirmations.
There is always so much going on that we don’t have words for—that time
I said Tuesday is the loneliest day of the week but couldn’t explain it,
the way you wouldn’t let it go. There are only so many ways to say I’m sorry,
but even fewer ways to say I’m sorry—I just don’t know what for.
Sarah Mills is a freelance writer and editor. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in SoFloPoJo, Beaver Magazine, Miniskirt Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Third Wednesday, Rogue Agent, Glass Mountain, Philadelphia Stories, and San Antonio Review. You can visit her at sarahmillswrites.com.