WE WHO DRANK FROM THE GLASS
We’d go anywhere if it meant we’d be together. We talked about ourselves by saying we, our, ours. Our favorite song. Our spot outside of town. Our parties, our birthdays, our dinners. We went to the woods. We built a fire. We were together. We got too drunk. We picked each other up. We slept in the same bed a hundred times—when it snowed, when we were scared, when we were excited. We had dreams about each other. We danced in dorm rooms, egged each other on. We took night walks. We ate fries on the grass of Main Lawn and warned skateboarders about the crack in the path before it could send them sprawling. We walked that huge fallen tree until it finally snapped over the creek, dropped us ankle-deep in wildlife and algae. We braided each other’s hair. We told each other how beautiful we looked. We talked about loving each other, and loving other people, and loving all the ways we showed it. We got too drunk again. We picked each other up. We picked apples. We picked flowers. We watched TV together. We fell asleep together. We drove together. We hung out of the sunroof and the windows. We cooked meals, together, all our favorites at once, and we ate and we laughed and we promised to do it again, the next day and the next, until “together” was an assumption instead of a hope.
Back then, no one ever liked to spend much time with the five of us because there was always a sixth entity taking up any empty space—a shape crafted by our embodied history, all the inside jokes and references and memories and characters we built out of years of friendship become sentient. We filled every room until we made it our room. We named it together and we left it too crowded. No one else could squeeze in. No one else could speak the language.
We created a lexicon worth living in.
Japanese Breakfast and Solange, dating apps projected on the television screen, Ouija boards, jam jars decorated with nail polish, fingernails slick with oil paint, Richard Siken poems, Carmen Maria Machado essays, Exquisite Corpse drawn in Finch’s sketchbook, Club Penguin and Phase 10, Strawberitas and girl blunts packed with lavender and rose petals, zines about queer horror movies, boy drag crafted with mascara mustaches, the time Amrita accidentally did the splits on Main Lawn, the time we got kicked off the swing set by the police, the time Saz fell asleep on top of a half-eaten bar of chocolate and woke up with it smeared in her hair. Rhinestones stuck to our cheeks with lash glue. The mouse in the kitchen Caroline caught with a bag of tortillas. Finch’s fire escape and the way morning smelled in the winter and the cling of cold metal through denim. Waxing moons and tarot decks. Saz’s locket with Fiona Apple on one side of the heart and Kate Bush on the other, the kissing sound she made when she snapped it shut. Green eyeshadow, hand-me-downs, Jennifer’s Body, cinnamon brooms bundled with ribbon.
