September 28th, 2021

footnotes

i have a picture of him on my homescreen. his nails are black and still wet with fresh paint, and he is wearing the hoodie he wears every time we go out, and i can trace my index finger down the angles of his face and remember what the tip of his nose felt like beneath my hands.

in the moment i snap this candid, he is fiddling on his phone with his palm curled into mine, chuckling softly at the sight of my concealer smeared onto the thrasher logo decorating his chest, and i can still feel the burning weight of his hand on the side of my thigh. i have a smile on my face and i think "yes, maybe i am special after all."

it doesn’t happen often, but sometimes i’ll inhale and suddenly smell him, grasp a whiff of his scent and think about eucalyptus trees and pine and roughened fingers picking greening leaves out of my hair, college campuses and watching reruns of Psych off his Amazon Prime account while he posts video after video on my previously empty TikTok profile.

because when his layers erode and fall to bedrock, they peel away to reveal the saccharine, the gratuitous, the parts of him that run slender fingers against my scalp and slip my rings over his scraped knuckles.

every time, he displays the shards of his being he shows no one else, the ones he never places in palms that ask for fear he’ll cut too deep; and every time, i let him scar his name onto my soul and scrape shakespeare onto my ribs and sear my cauterized wounds open again, all while i think: how privileged am i? how privileged am i to sit back and watch as he transforms—a little less glass, a little more human.

but as soon as the soft lines and gentle curves are unveiled, they’re gone, replaced by harsh parallels and stiff angles, one-word responses and a little blue arrow drawn next to the word “opened” on my screen for three days straight.

and sometimes, like right now, i give up the “i’m never angry with you” facade and i skin off the “i’m okay with being a second choice” mask i usually wear under my smiling cheeks and i let myself go. i write word after word after word in paragraphs he’ll never read because i’ll never show him because i’m wonderful okay perfect reliable fine, he’ll be smiling and not thinking of me and not thinking of these lines as he laughs with his long-haired pretty-eyed dimple-cheeked girlfriend, and i’ll be here. i’ll be here. i’ll be here with all my emotions, all of them, always, compacted into the footnotes.

Here is my bio: Halle Ewing (she/they) is a 14-year-old from Orange County with a love for the written word. She finds herself reflected in the lines she writes, and when they aren't frantically trying to remember that one word on the tip of their tongue, they're drinking way too much coffee, screaming along to Nirvana, playing water polo, or begging her friends to take pictures of them. Their work can be found in the Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine and the Weight Journal.