Static

It’s late July, and we’ve made a home here on this backyard trampoline.

The net is ripped and dotted with the carcasses of various flying things that got stuck along their way.

There’s gashes in the fabric and gashes in our knees.

We’ve scraped them raw racing up the gravel drive, and now we’re breathless, breathing in the sweat of the blackberries, our girlish shrieks still audible on the Appalachian wind before collapsing here again on the black tarp beneath the poplars and the oppression of an air thick with the screams of cicadas.

We lay there in the silence only sisterhood can make comfortable.

The everything and nothingness.

The all-we’ve-ever

And you reach over with a finger and shock me and roll over laughing, and I do too, our hair rising on end, standing straight up along the black tarp where we’ve built a childhood, and you are the extension of me.

It’s late July again, and we’ve made homes a few states away.

And twenty years have created a silence only sisterhood can make uncomfortable.

I left girlhood too soon while it seeped out of you slowly.

But because of it, my summers are now filled with bandaids and blackberries and trampoline days again.

And she reaches over with a tiny finger and shocks me and rolls over laughing, and I do too, our hair rising on end, standing straight up along the black tarp where we’re building a memory, and she is the extension of me.

And I can be what she doesn’t have because I remember all too well

what it was to be a girl.

To build worlds and confide in and exist together with you.

The humanity that gives a torn-up tarp with metal poles a life of its own.

The heaviness of a humid air and sweat soaked bangs cocooning us there,

side by side

The sun-flushed bodies that give a current somewhere to run through.

And it keeps running—

down that gravel drive,

through the poplars and the deafening screams of cicadas,

across states and decades,

despite how we’ve gotten stuck along the way.

That something invisible there, still acting on us, living between us.

The everything amid the nothingness.

It’s all I’ve ever—