Cynical and cyclical, time taunted my whole life; sibling-like. Not older, or younger, but the twin you absorbed in utero—who’s life you stole, watching you waste yours.
The buttery waltz of defeat to it, gaudy and blatant; worth watching ’till the end. Spins you around, but he’s from outer space (he’s thirty three thousand twenty eight and a half years old) and you’re in the fourteenth century (dead at thirteen, as it goes.)
Smaller than Alaska when I grasped it, first-danced it, grieving on my mother’s comforter, “I will never be in the fourth grade, again!” Claws pretending to be thoughts, I was sentimental when a glue stick ended.
I’ll never be eleven again. Take the bus down East Second Avenue. Belt the dress I was given just a Summer ago, it doesn’t fit. It used to.
“Sweetheart,” My mom would start, softly.
And I’d cry and I’d cry, at the end of her bed, every June and early September and mid-September and January and March, for the school year and the first day of Autumn and the New Year and the first day of Spring.
Then one day in Science class, Irreversible chemical change. Independent reading, like it all was, explaining, when you beat eggs, oil, butter, milk, sprinkles, pinch of vanilla extract, you get the batter of a birthday cake. Put it in the oven, comes out goldened; the whole afternoon scented frosting. But you can never undo it all and get an egg again, the measures of milk and oil, the teaspoon of vanilla, the pieces of butter. The sprinkles.
It wrecked me, a little bit, for the rest of my life.
“A baked birthday cake world,” I’d thought, what do you mean it could never be a whole egg again?
It was the first thing I thought of when my dad died. “We have to find a way to make the egg whole, again.”
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