Nightcrawling

by Leila Mottley

part of me wished I had stayed away like Marcus. Death is easier to live through unseen.

Funeral day is a reckoning, when we mimic thieves and really just find excuses for our tears, then light up, eat until we have never felt fuller, and find somewhere to dance. Funeral day is the culmination of all our past selves, when we hold our own memorials for people we never buried right.

Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up. I don’t say goodbye to Shauna and she doesn’t even turn around to watch me leave, to head back out to a sky that sunk into deep blue while my brother asked me to do the one thing I know I shouldn’t, the one thing Shauna cared enough to warn me about: hollow myself out for another person who ain’t gonna give a shit when I’m empty.

School’s got as many potholes as the streets, always chipping, always leaving us to trip.

An orchestrated love is almost more precious than a natural one; harder to give up something you spent that long making.

Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun’s out.

art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us.

I would be the one to start us out by painting cardboard with paint we picked up for a dollar per tube at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. It’s the only reason we ever bothered riding into Temescal, a neighborhood that boasts its pistachio ice cream like they aren’t settling the land and calling it entrepreneurship.

I’m starting to think there is no such thing as a good cop, that the uniform erases the person inside it.

And I am still waiting to be hit by some universe-halting love that will turn me inside out and remove all the rotting parts of me. Or at least something to make life bearable that isn’t another person who will leave.