Lavender and Gardenias

Her room smelled of lavender and gardenias

As we lay under silky rays of sun

And danced around the truth in long, snaking sentences,

Words falling over one another until they

Became nothing, only syllables

Strung together to sound like something real.

It wasn’t perfume, she told me,

But the air freshener her mother spritzed into the room

That sticky summer day,

Sitting inconspicuously

On her sticker-covered dresser, pale purple—

It’s funny the things you remember.

She had rings on every finger, even though

I’d never seen her wear even one before, and she said

It was an effect of the smell. It made her stir crazy.

I didn’t really understand

How that translated to the wearing of the rings, but

I didn’t say anything.

(Later I watched her painstakingly take off every one before cannonballing

Into the lake—right away, no hesitations, as I shivered

On the grassy bank, the scent

Of her room still sticking to my goose-prickled skin,

Wondering what the point was of rings, if you

Didn’t wear them all the time.)

And at the end of the day, as the humidity

Began to fall from the sky in an undignified staticky rush,

and we ate

Sour ripe blueberries from her bushes

while catching the drops on our tongues,

We toyed with “forever,”

Talking about living on a farm someday,

With chickens and sheep and cucumbers

And a wind chime on the front porch.

We laced ourselves

Into the edges of a world we couldn’t yet fathom,

Couldn’t begin to wrap our soft, mushy brains around.

The word “forever” was an imagining to us,

Unreal and unable for us to commit to.

All that was real to us—

Not the shiny college brochures

Fanned out like magazines in the school office,

Not our parents’ questions about our futures,

Their eyes speaking even more than their words did—

But a sunny room with creaky wooden floors

A whirring ceiling fan

Flowers hanging from the ceiling

And the scent of lavender and gardenias.