Monsoon Season
For M.F.
The opposite of girl-love is girl-hate.
On my first day in the city she took me to The Museum of Rocks That Look Like Faces. We spent hours mimicking and grimacing beneath that yellow light. That summer it rained every day. For a few hours each afternoon the world turned blue and grey and the sound against our tin roof drowned out all other noises. For those hours I would descend into a small green world; half sleeping, half watching leaves pressed against my window as they bowed beneath the rain.
She said she liked when we would go out after, when the asphalt was washed and the colors of the world were fresh and vibrant and new. It seemed, even from the beginning, that we were built in opposition. She liked to be there to catch the early light of dawn, I stayed up late and filled the small hours of the morning. At the beginning, she liked this about me. I always worried over possibilities, desired answers and boundaries, and plans for moving forward. She dwelled in ambiguity, more interested in the mystery of questions than she could ever be in an answer.
(eds. note: A portion of this document has been destroyed by rain.)
At the end of that summer, she dropped me off at the station and didn’t wait to see me leave. I watched her retreat, my face hidden even if she had looked for it. Even then, a part of me knew that things would never be the same. That even if we saw each other again, which we never did, a part of her would be walking away from me forever, and that I was done chasing her.
Were we sisters, lovers or just friends? Maybe none of the above, only strangers. Maybe I was in love with her, maybe I wanted to be her, or maybe, back then, I just wanted to be anybody but myself. As the train pulled away from the station the rain began to fall again, blurring out the outside world and reflecting my face in the window back to me. And I knew, despite anything I could ever do, any person I could ever be, in the end what I’m left with, finally—is just me.
Dylan Morison (she/her) is a fiction writer currently based out of Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate student by day and a line cook by night, Dylan is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing has appeared in The Feminist Wire, Opaque Quarterly, and Landfill Magazine. She has an adorable dog named Bunny.
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