Abbreviations by Naomi Carr (17, California)

[Content warning: sexual content]
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​             It is three pm on Mainstreet. It is Thursday afternoon. It is warm because it is March, and suburban California knows of heat. There is a girl on Mainstreet, in a park, across the street from the local ice cream place where only the popular high school kids work. She is young. She is beautiful in the way that sunflowers are beautiful— momentarily. She has brown hair and brown eyes and a brown cardigan. She loves cardigans. She wears Doc Martens in March and her hair down. She wears rings on every finger, fingernails trimmed. She looks like a stereotype. Maybe she is. This girl is with another girl, much taller than she, but younger by a few months.

This other girl is blonde or brunette or black box dye or balayage or buzzcut. This other girl is burnt-out gifted student but speaks three languages and knows how it is to have a mother tongue. These girls look like friends. They are not. They are hand holding in parking lots, late night drives through backroads, picnics in neighborhood parks. They are picked petals off of daisies falling to the concrete. They are she loves me, she loves me not. They are love on lazy Sunday afternoons when Sunday afternoons call for anything but laziness. They are falling asleep on FaceTime calls at midnight. They are two am confessions. They are too good to be true, but they are true anyway. The other girl takes the girl home. They eat strawberries on the couch because watermelons are not in season yet. They watch Heartstopper. They cuddle. They do not care about Monkeypox. This girl lets the other girl hold her like she has never known. They fall asleep, one girl beside the other, on top of the other, before the third episode concludes. When the girl wakes up, the other girl is brewing tea in the kitchen. They are both sleepy. By now, it is eight pm. The girl realizes she has slept through dance class. She doesn’t even feel bad. The girl drinks peppermint tea from the other girl’s mug. The other girl shows off her mug collection in the highest cabinet. They eat Milano cookies or milk chocolate or mochi or macadamia nuts covered in toffee. They talk about school, about life, about how one is not inextricable from the other. They talk about abbreviations— BU, UoT, MIT, UBC, UCSB, and so on. They talk about money and graduating in three years instead of four to save it. They talk about sex. The girl blushes, and then the other. They are both virgins. Until they aren’t. They are two bodies in suburban California bed sheets or Dallas daylight or a Paris apartment. One girl imagines them in Montreal, in her studio she doesn’t own yet. The other fantasizes about more far-away places like Tokyo or Shanghai. They cry, then kiss, then sleep. They forget, for a moment, the world around them. The next day, they walk across the stage, cap and gown, their names said aloud by favorite teachers before family dinners. They graduate, not together, but together. They move tassels from right to left. They throw caps in the air and watch as they fall like hail. They do not kiss until after. They travel together to the east coast or east Asia or eastern Europe. Actually, they do not travel to eastern Europe because eastern Europe is homophobic, but they think about it. They talk about it. They want to defy. They spend weeks in foreign places and in the commonplace of the other’s company. They return home before the peaches ripen at the girl’s home. They pick peaches together. They help each other pack for abbreviated places. They talk not about useless things like school and sex, but about moving, ending, abbreviating. They hate how these abbreviations take them so far apart. It is five pm on a Tuesday. It is early August. Two girls kiss in one of their childhood bedrooms. They do more than kiss. They empty packed suitcases, they throw lifetimes of clothes onto the floor. They yell. They cry. They kiss. They cry some more. They cry a lifetime of tears into cardboard boxes. They tear up the boxes. They hold each other for the last time, though they do not call it the last time. They do not think of Paris or Poland, of Berkeley or Tokyo, of Fresno, or any other far-off place. They sit. They fall asleep on mounds of unfolded clothes and memories. They wake up. They situate suitcases again, slowly. They repack lifetimes into cardboard boxes. They kiss, and this time, they find the words to call it the last time. They do not say goodbye or words of lasting loyalties or love. They kiss, and that is all.