Sunburn: Exclusive American Edition with Additional Material

by Chloe Michelle Howarth

These days the girls let themselves crumble when the boys come around. I’m hoping that I’m just late developing, and in a month or two, I’ll start to crumble as well. I can’t stand being on the outside of what everyone else is feeling.

Sometimes knowing someone for a long time is the only reason you’d be friends with them. It isn’t much of a bond, and still it is unbreakable.

It’s humiliating to wonder if I have ever meant the same things to her as she does to me.

perhaps we are all just islands, as wild and merciless as each other, separated by our countless defects. Perhaps there is no remedy for it, and all we can do is learn which parts of ourselves to deny and which parts to bring into the light.

Outwardly, we are all living the same life, but inwardly, I hope, everybody has as many private crises as I do.

More and more, I think that sex may not be the sacred union that I once imagined it to be. Rather, it seems to be a secular thing: condensation on a car window, squeaking skin on rain-soaked bales, a wonderful disgrace.

Some parts of her I keep in my memory, others in my heart. This, I keep in my blood.

If she would let me, I would cling to her side, I would be a little fruit fly in her kitchen again. Mother, look at me, I am not ready to let you go.

Too late I realise that she has been the Summer of my life. What a slow and painful death this shall be.

The water is scalding, caustic, endless, and scrubbing my skin, I know that it would take an entire ocean to wash her off me.

Walking through the morning, down Susannah’s road, I feel myself become who I was. I am on my own path. At last, I am nearing the place where I belong. All the time I spent trying to find myself, I was being somebody that I am not. I was born perfect, and every step I took brought me further from that.