Your mother takes your blanket out of the laundry basket and puts it back on your bed. It\u2019s pink and old and loved. She sits there, wondering what to say to you, the same way you are right now. Her eyelashes weigh heavy against her cheeks, so downturned recently. What about the sky? What about all of the people who come to meet with her? Just more looking at the floor, her hands, your photo on the table in the living room.\n<\/p>\n
\nYou want to tell her to do the laundry. After all, if she forgets that she is the one who took it out, then you\u2019re the one who\u2019s going to be stuck with her nagging.\n<\/p>\n
\nSomeone shifts downstairs. The floor creaks. A window opens. You feel all of it, even the hesitant gardenia scent of another candle freshly lit. Your favorite: you must\u2019ve owned a dozen. All of these bodies in so little space. Some of them you haven\u2019t seen in years. How do you greet familiar strangers? It\u2019s much easier to wait there in your room with your mother until she does all the talking for you.\n<\/p>\n
\nShe plays with the edge of the blanket. Against her tan hand, the color looks even more worn out.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe world tilts before you can open your mouth, you with it\u2014\n<\/p>\n
\nand the window shuts\n<\/p>\n
\nbehind you.\n<\/p>\n
\n
\nIt should be cold outside tonight. You walk with your arms around yourself because you didn\u2019t have time to grab your jacket in the rush. It\u2019s always like this now, an endless coming-and-going, not knowing you\u2019re on a train then suddenly you\u2019re pushed onto a new station. Always when the words are almost<\/em> to you, your voice hoarse and unspeakable. Six days of silence, now. You always come back home, though. You could let her know that\u2014you are always returning home.\n<\/p>\n \nYou pass another streetlamp and it flickers, trying to make sense of your bodylessness, your missing shadow. The street cats follow you with their eyes, but they don\u2019t come up to you anymore. To them, you are a breeze. You are a marker of passing time.\n<\/p>\n \nYou miss when the soles of your shoes made noise.\n<\/p>\n \nIt should be cold out tonight, you think again. It should be cold out tonight. Again, and again, and again as you hug yourself tighter, waiting for the temperature to shift against you. For the bare skin of your arms to feel <\/em>bare. For your shoes to squeak against concrete after you walk through a puddle on purpose.\n<\/p>\n \nSomeone\u2019s dog barks from behind a fence. You know it has a name that starts with B, but like your own, that name is lost somewhere in the garden on the other side. There are a few things you got to keep: faces, your family, what you liked, what you didn\u2019t <\/em>like, the route to school and back. Your best friend kissing you during a sleepover, her lips slick with three-dollar lip gloss that tasted like peach.\n<\/p>\n \nMaybe it\u2019s her house you\u2019re walking by. Four days ago, you would have known it was her house. You might have even stopped, trying to climb the fence and failing, your palms slipping off the metal like rain. You just want her name back. You want your mother\u2019s name back, and dad\u2019s. Maybe an uncle or aunt\u2019s.\n<\/p>\n \nYour own matters less. People keep repeating it, over and over, so often that you\u2019re tired of it.\n<\/p>\n \nIf all goes as it has, then by the time they take your photo off the table and put it back on the wall, another one among a dozen, you might begin to ask yourself whose house you’re in. Can you forget your own face? The mirror doesn\u2019t house you.\n<\/p>\n \nThat felt good, at first. You don\u2019t think you would want to see what you look like. Something took you\u2014whatever state it gave you back, you\u2019re okay not knowing.\n<\/p>\n \nThe whirring kicks up again. Low static at the back of your mind, growing into a hum and then a headache until your whole body buzzes like static. Someone calls for the dog, the sound eaten before you can make sense of it. You\u2019re alone again. Each step is a little lighter, a little less defined, and you tilt again, and tilt, seeing dirt and rocks and someone else\u2019s eyes as you pass each other by in the crossing-onward, a gentle tilt,\n<\/p>\n \n \n \nand you\u2019re at the gas station. Blue lights from inside, more whirring from the drinking machines, someone buying a pack of smokes. Your dad\u2019s eyes are red when he walks to your car, a smattering of stickers covering the back window. As he sits in the driver\u2019s seat, one hand grasping a lit cigarette and the other on the steering wheel, you believe that he sees you. You tell yourself this is the truth, that he is not peering at his own reflection in the window and not seeing his own eyes, but yours. <\/em>He must see you everywhere in himself, now. Even more so than before. He turns his gaze to the road, away from you, and rolls the window down. Tilt.\n<\/p>\n \nYou\u2019re in an old classroom. Your middle school, maybe, the way it looked years ago. Plastic, gray chairs. A child leaning over one desk, scribbling on it with a pencil. You walk up behind her, close enough to see your handwriting tracing her letters, you realize it\u2019s your best friend. She used to want to write her last name with the same cursive A<\/em>s that you did. Ones that look particularly fancy and grown. Your own voice from the hallway calls for her, and she goes running, leaving the window open so that the homework on your desk sweeps onto the floor, and you do too. Tilt.\n<\/p>\n \nYou\u2019re next to me. I\u2019m sorry, but this isn\u2019t the place to be, either. You\u2019ll be back here when the time is right, and we can listen to the rain together. But not now. All these words and no verbs for you to make use of except for this one: tilt.\n<\/p>\n \nNot a garden but close. Your grandparents\u2019 summer house, ripe with sun and June. Someone who sounds like your mother laughs from inside, and the door swings open. She has cut her hair\u2014when did it begin to streak gray? Like the silver ring on her finger she wears to this day, some day, a day far beyond you. You know time has passed, but time is a stranger to you now. It won\u2019t tell you where it has been or where it is going, even as you stumble after it. Your father\u2019s silhouette moves in the hallway, following her the way you chase what is not a memory. Long grass tickles your shins, the sun leaning against your back and neck without offering anything but light, and even the light does not take to you. It leans and leans, through and through. When you stand by the white, plastic outdoor table in hopes your mom will offer you a cup of coffee, you think she looks at you, mouthing:\n<\/p>\n \ntilt. And you do, you do. You tilt, and you see other eyes, hear other names that other passerbyers are tired of. You see a real garden, with sunflowers and honeybees. This was your house, lights in the hallway clicking on and off. It is fall and you watch everything vanish into the earth, taking you with it, slowly slowly\n<\/p>\n \ntilting, slip through the front door that is ajar, ignoring the date on the calendar strung to the wall on your right that was never there before, and your photo next to it, ignore the red circle around the day you won\u2019t let yourself remember and forget,\n<\/p>\n \n \n \ntilting, until you are standing in your bedroom, again.\n<\/p>\n \nThere\u2019s your blanket on the bed. It has been washed.\n<\/p>\n \nYou touch your clothes in the opened wardrobe, lingering on the college hoodie with the tag on. When you tug on the sleeve, it almost comes off, rattling on the hanger.\n<\/p>\n \nOpen curtains allow the sun to snag on the dust particles. For a moment, you feel not so different from all of those scattered pieces.\n<\/p>\n \nThere\u2019s a scent of gardenia in the shape of a sound. It is tan fingers moving up your arm and into an embrace. It is your mother\u2019s hair against your cheek. Your father\u2019s poetry books fresh out of a box. That one campfire that shook almost too violently on the only road trip you ever took. It burns, and burns, and your mother lets go of you. Your father loves you, and he lets you go, too. Your best friend loves you\u2014for you, it will always be present. She marries someone she will love just as much, and the thought does not ache you. The flowers in the garden wilt and sprout for you. Some of them remain in the soil forever.\n<\/p>\n \nYou love your name, the one you\u2019re hiding from, and you let it go. I take it from you, like I do all the others, and I place it in a great river of other words that mean just as much and as little. You pause before watching it flood into water, tangle into adjectives, a noun. Laughter pearls from downstairs, plucked from the same great river you are walking into, believing you will find things just as beautiful and temporary inside of it. I hold you there. You are dust particles in the air, and honeybees and regrets, and years from now, someone else will remember you as they tilt, tilt, tilt into the next part of the world, where you will wait for them.\n<\/p>\n \nYou know it is alright that you\u2019re gone,\n<\/p>\n \n \n \nand you go.<\/p>\n Faye Wikner (she\/they) is a Swedish writer who recently traded the mountains of Tennessee for New Jersey suburbia. While completing her MFA in Creative & Professional Writing at William Paterson University, she also reads for Map Literary and The Adroit Journal. She is a big fan of lengthy video essays and a simple cup of coffee<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Your mother takes your blanket out of the laundry basket and puts it back on your bed. It\u2019s pink and old and loved. She sits there, wondering what to say to you, the same way you are right now. Her eyelashes weigh heavy against her cheeks, so downturned recently. What about the sky? 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