Dawn West
One. When Aimee was thirteen, she carried this Polaroid camera with her everywhere. She walked up to me one day and asked to take my picture. I put my knitting down. Her eyes folded into a squint. I said sure. She breathed heavy and took the picture quick. “I’m Aimee,” she said. “I’m Jess,” I said. “Why’d you wanna take my picture?” She kicked a pebble then looked at me. Her eyes were older than her. “You looked sad,” she said. Am I that easy? I thought. Or is she looking for her in me; hunting for similarities. My mom always told me people do that when they fall in love.
Two. When she was sixteen, Aimee started taking Xanax. When I asked her what the doctor said about it, she told me he thought it would take the edge off. “Off of what?” I asked. She shrugged and hid behind her hair. Sometimes she would crush them up while we did homework and listened to records. She would drag her finger through the nub of powder and smear it like frosting on her tongue. “That’s fucking dumb,” I said one night. “You might as well snort it.” Aimee tipped back on my bed, cupping her tiny breasts with an indignant stare. “Everybody snorts. I’m not everybody.”
Three. Cheesecake is Aimee’s favorite food. I left school early to make a nutmeg cheesecake for her seventeenth birthday. She walked in my kitchen while I dusted nutmeg out of my hair. I could tell it was hard for her to look at me. “That’s so sweet,” she said, her voice creasing. I started taking off my mom’s apron when Aimee squeezed my hand. I used the edge of the apron to drink the wet from her cheeks. “So how’d it go?” I asked. She stuck two fingers in the cheesecake and pulled back a knot of it. “I experience a mordant sense of reality,” she said through gooey fingers. “Apparently.” I got out two plates and just kept on smiling.
Four. Aimee spent the majority of college alone. She got thin and quiet. Her hair was miserably long. I saw her much less, and when I did she would shiver and chain-smoke. She said she felt unsafe. She made a mural of her old Polaroids and spent hours staring at them. She called it cataloging. She played old folk songs and danced alone, eyes closed and arms distended. Classmates called her a flaky bitch. She said humans have thorns, you just can’t see them. She called me late one night, apologies soup-thick in my ear. I sang her favorite song into the phone, “Oh you’re in my blood like holy wine; you taste so bitter and so sweet. Oh I could drink a case of you…” Eventually she stopped crying. Eventually we were laughing and telling warm lies. Eventually we hung up our phones and stared at the same sorry moon.
Five. Aimee has a three year old son named Caleb. His hair is long too. He hugs me and I pat his nude back, already dressed in a fuzzy pelt. Just like Aimee. We used to stuff ourselves in my twin bed and I used to press my palm into the comma of her back and we used to whisper about being kindred spirits, about staying close until we died, about needing each other like water. “You were right,” Aimee says. “About what?” I say. Caleb sits down on their driveway and starts slapping the black top with his hands, giggles rippling up his throat and swallowing our attention. We both laugh. “I mean you were right about me.” I hand her the Riesling I brought, an apology for not being around. I apologize for loved ones all the time. She kisses my cheek and leads me inside. Caleb gallops behind, cackling about something we didn’t see. I wonder how much we miss now that we’ve grown. He runs for his toys, and I don’t say so but I’m grateful. “I fucking love that little guy,” Aimee says, pouring two glasses of wine, “but even he can make me blue.”
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Dawn West (b. 1987) reads, writes, and has a dirty mouth in Ohio. She can be found online at Nouvelliste.
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