I’ve never been to a sleepover before, but what I do know is that
everyone talks. Nobody sleeps when you start unlocking your secrets.
In the dark, when it’s okay to blink more times than normal, and
no one can see the way your eyes dilate more than they usually do,
everyone sits in a circle and talks about the deep stuff –
you skip skimming the surface and cut straight to the bone.
Audrey’s never been to a sleepover either, but she gathers that
if she ever goes to one, we’d just stay up for half of the night watching Netflix,
and we’d say we’d watch chick flicks for the hell of it but really
we’d just watch cartoons and dramas that no one really understands,
so everyone would be watching the screen and not
her intertwining her fingers with Flora.
Flora would rather fold origami, fold hundreds of hearts,
leave them scattered all over her lap, fold a few swans,
leave them in Audrey’s lap, fold a few butterflies, and leave them in my hands.
She never keeps anything, just gives everything away,
because she admits that she doesn’t like to keep impermanent things.
When Helen says that she’s never been to a sleepover, I realize that
my friends and I have all been too afraid to leave our own houses after dark.
She likes to listen to music and if she ever had us over at night,
she’d wax poetry between pulses and listen to the rest of us fall asleep.
She likes to let things drift into the wind, and that’s how she likes
her secrets to disappear as well.
I stash mine in the closet, ordered in jars or tucked into the folds of my pockets,
in places where I know I can find them easily but will refuse to look at.
Sometimes I let the bigger ones sit against the wall on the floor,
grow skeletons, and fall apart.
If I ignore those long enough, I imagine that I’ll forget them,
and they’ll become impermanent as well,
like the hundreds of hearts and swans and butterflies
that Flora has folded before leaving for someone else to remember.
She taught me that it’s easier to forget when you don’t have to acknowledge
something you’ve never admitted to anyways.