When My Best Friend’s First Love Slips Into A Coma, We Sit On Opposite Sides of the Bed Quietly
by Katie Grierson
She had loved him unrequited
since the small-scale spelling bee
in first grade when she stood
and spelled two t-o-o. And when I
giggled into my sleeve, she imagined him–
only a room away–thinking of her
and how he would make all w’s
into o’s. They were madly in love.
It was as real as the sharpened orange pencil,
rolling away after being stabbed into the soft
part of our thighs, the hurt only seconds
long. The lead hand-in-hand in us, poisonous and
forever. Our bodies still remember being
young, sunburnt, Catholic school
skirted and Jesus-loving. I wonder
what he remembers of the sun and how our
clip-on ties held its heat. A year older, I knew
the back of his head at a distance better
than I knew anything else about him. She had
never kissed him. Never opened her eyes
while their lips touched and recognized
the freckle on his eyelid as the most wonderful
thing she’d ever seen. I didn’t notice him
in high school. But she knew he went to parties
and sometimes, growing up and stumbling from a party,
would wander home, desert everywhere, the desert
inside him. A quiet loneliness buzzing through his fingers.
She went to the same college as him, and one day, slipped
out of love like a sock she’d worn for too long. He went boxing,
got hit in the head too hard, spent a few days in a coma, and
was gone. The local news showed photos of his girlfriend and
him. She’d wanted to marry him. We wondered why everyone felt so
young. Why the desert went on forever, homeless and grieving.