Watermelon mush lines our teeth and lips like a bloody lover. We’re sitting with tangled legs, elbows propping fruit-heavy bellies skyward, brushing hair and daylight out of our eyes. The crimson sun sits low like the jeans on our waists. I laughed at you to get your dirty Converse off my knees, but they’re twinkling their mud-smudged smiley-face patches there anyway.
We’re talking politics then friends then four-year-old gossip then economy —snap-snap-snap like bullets, words sinking into the golden sky like flies in honey. I ask, can I doyour hair? You say, you can’t braid to save your life, but I’m brushing your hair into a fishtailanyway, sitting safely in the smile in your voice. We take the bunch of sunflowers you gave meand pretty up the rooftop we have visited since we were ninth graders, united in fright andloneliness and the blanket of the stars. Beneath us, New York City unspools like silver wire:made bright by the sun, made alive by the people, made unforgettable by the August scent of burning, blazing possibility.
And all the time, I wonder if you know my brain is whirring, that I’m not here enough to remember the taste of the sleet-textured watermelon or how it froze both of our mouths so our conversation went on menopause for half a second. That when my feet step off the rooftop, I won’t remember how the sunflowers radiated a neon effervescence around the dilapidated cement or shot gold through your dark red hair. That I’m desperately clutching for the pieces of the right here, right now, but they’re slipping between my fingers like grains of time. Do you? Do you know?
You turn, and something about your face shifts, the dimple that comes with your real smile precipitating into the sea of your skin. You turn away. You don’t say it because you don’t need to. Of course, I do.
I pull you onto the edge of the rooftop. Sundown is hazing into nighttime like the burnished neurons of a fever dream, gripping the parts of your face cast in shadow. Sit with me, I say, and let’s practice dying. I dangle my Vans and you dangle your Converse over the New York City skyline. If I shifted my weight forward just so, I could take flight — helpless beneath the sun, the girl imprinted in gold just before she falls, graceful and elegant, arms and legs elongated into a dance of spiraling. Instead, I lean into you, hugging the warm and soft parts I have known since I was a baby who spoke in physical touch.
I let the waxen evening deceive us again with its oblivion. The words flow once more, sliding from your favorite clothing store to presidents to books, replacing the ones I won’t let myself say, that I won’t hurt you with. Do you know what I’m thinking? I wonder if you know that my heart is bleeding worse than it ever did when I broke up with my boyfriend behind the science lab fourteen nights ago, who I’ve loved since I was in second grade. I wonder if the pain crackles through your bones and peels away your skin until the steady, burning fire of regret is all that remains.
You lever yourself up with your elbow. One wrong move and you’ll slip off, fall into city streets long steeped in the flavor of broken bodies and broken dreams. Let’s not dance around it all, you say suddenly, and this time I know you don’t mean the K-pop routines we rehearsed in your dingy basement at three in the morning, pajama-clad with bunny slippers for microphones, laughing ourselves silly in the mirror.
I cling to you more tightly. Why not? I know you think this is a goodbye picnic. But nothing about this bye can be good, even though I am the one who invited you here and told you to dress up and kissed you on both cheeks like I am a debutante selling myself away.
You give an imperceptible shake of your head, pain coating your face in a neon sheen. You always called New York City a grayscale of nothingness, you recall, but it isn’t now, is it? Don’t you think it’s so pretty? We watch the silver buildings eclipse the blazing sun, a bright clementine slice sinking back into the shimmering waves. I try to consider this, feel the way you want me to: young, hopeful, trying to set roots in a city with the water and sun to spare.
But you and I know it isn’t true, that I’ve given up setting roots in a place I don’t love, that doesn’t have the water or sun, that sits and watches when I break my back for the dreams I’ve never gotten. Before now.
You know, after all this time, I still don’t get why you need to go, you say, leaning into me, clutching to life like you have forgotten the long drop below. This is the city of opportunity. You were born into it. I hear the bitter note in your voice like red lemon, the fruit sore that means you don’t believe in it yourself. You didn’t choose this city either, didn’t choose these crowds or this monochrome skyline, but I’m the one leaving you behind for country roads a thousand miles away.
I say this place is not my birthright and you know it, unbraiding and untangling your fiery hair. Guilt sits, hot and heavy, in the pit of my stomach.
You’re silent for a while, watching the sun drop beneath kissing skyscrapers. Finally, you say, it’s not mine either.
I cradle your head against my chest, listening to your heartbeat, that furious thump-thump-thump like the wings of a baby bird straining against ropes to fly. I’ve never wanted to bring you with me more, to box you up in my suitcase and take you away, because the pain of carrying the pieces of memories rather than the entirety of you feels like it could crack my porcelain skin. You were there when my hands were raw and cracked from hours in the steam of a tiny Manhattan restaurant, the taste of braised hóng shāo ròu printed on my fingers. You were there when I screamed into the stars that I had nothing left, not the approval or the money or the energy to put up a facade. You were there, and if the power of my heart could embrace yours and join us by the hip, then I wouldn’t be swallowing back tears before the day I’ve worked a whole lifetime for—the day I leave this smog and the silver behind.
You pull me a little closer. I hate that I can feel your doubt, the gap already bridging itself between us. I say, I’m going to miss you more than my boyfriend. You say, good. And the possibility of this moment is so much, so vast, that it could drown me and I might allow the submergence. But at the last second, I’m still grappling for the lifeboat, kicking my legs and fighting the ocean to escape this city.
Your flaming red hair sinks into sundown, the sun a golden halo casting your skin in candle-oil light. For a second, New York City is flooded with fire, the heat and steadfastness and pain and magnificence that comes and goes where you come and go, and I wish I could shift my weight off this rooftop and take flight. Instead, we watch the eddies of dark red and citrus orange fade into the twinkling violet of endless night. For the first time, I think, this city might have been beautiful. ◆
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