No 7: TENDER AGE

PHOTO BY LUCIA AUERBACH

REBECCA KOPELMAN

I’m always at a tender age, I fear. I love my mother too much, I fear. Something monstrous inside this body may eat me alive, I fear. 

My Most Beautiful Friend tells me I shouldn’t worry, that all of this is just part of being Beautiful. Whenever she is inconvenienced, she ties her Beautiful Hair back and says it’s exactly the Divine Femininity that Sylvia Plath knew all about.

Didn’t she kill herself, I ask her, and she says yes, but Beautifully. She left out Bread and Milk for the children, remember?

Sometimes, I look at my warped reflection in the oven’s glass door and allow myself to wonder what it would be like to be swallowed by my own personal god. Sometimes, when I am chain smoking with my Beautiful Friends, I wonder if this is what Heaven feels like. 

Today, I awaken in your childhood bedroom with my little heart swollen in my breast. Today, more than most days, I ache for my Most Beautiful Friend, whose mother doesn’t sit her down on the bathroom floor and comb the knots from her hair. 

My Most Beautiful Friend lets her Beautiful Hair curl in on itself until it becomes one giant tangle, and then I’m the one to comb it out, to buy her fragrant conditioners and sit her on the cold bathroom tile. Then, there is always a knot at the center, bigger than the rest. I call it the Mothership, and marvel at its solidity, its curious Aliveness. Working my fingers through its ropy veins, I always feel somewhat guilty–as if I am painstakingly dismembering a beating heart.

But Here, but Now, I feel your body, and it is Real, warm and perspiring next to me. I dreamed last night that Heaven was an empty train car, and I had a window seat. You were there with me, but it wasn’t your presence that made it Heaven. There, in Heaven, we held each other, watching the nothingness outside dissolve into new, different nothingness. Your lips, in the dream, were pressed to my temple, and mine to the cool window. 

I slip by you and pad out into your Lovely Living Room, greet your Lovely Parents and pat your Lovely Dog on his big, gentle head.

This is Most Beautiful, I think. I miss her.