Just put your lips together and blow.
I didn’t know my grandmother.
But one afternoon I stood on the steps whistling for the dogs and the hair on my mother’s body stood up.
Whistling into the afternoon.
Whistling for the dogs.
Whistling just like my grandmother.
Whistling like a dead woman I’d never met.
“It’s just you.”
“Yeah it’s just me.”
“My mother used to whistle just like that.”
Every time I whistle for the dogs my mother’s blood runs cold.
He said he liked watching me sing.
Told me that I really sparkled when I sang.
“Sing me a song.”
“I don’t take requests.”
I don’t like to be forced. It’s better if he catches me, happily chirping away, forgetting there’s a world that exists beyond the melody, beyond the lyrics.
Just me and my song.
It’s Saturday morning and I sit at my kitchen table eating leftover pizza and leftover Chinese rice.
I wish I had tacos so it could really be balanced.
I hate wasting food.
So I sit here eating reheated shrimp fried rice and pepperoni pizza and I think, in 22 days I’ll be thirty years old.
Do you still get to do this when you’re an official grown up?
He said he loved me and I laughed.
“You can’t love me, you don’t know me.”
“But I love you. I’m in love with you.”
“You don’t love me.”
You can’t love me.
Me.
The broken creature crying out for help.
Because no one loves the broken things. They just get pushed to the side and thrown away.
I have this thing with freckles and birth marks.
I think they’re cute.
The other night I was tracing the ones on his back with my finger. “You know something?” I asked him. “If you connected these, it almost looks like a constellation.”
“Oh yeah? Which one?”
I traced the outline of the familiar figure once again.
“Orion.” I smiled to myself and kissed one of the little dots on his shoulder.
He flipped over to face me. “Turn around,” he told me.
“Why do I feel like you are about to do something incredibly inappropriate to me?” I laughed and turned my back towards him.
He pulled my tank top up and his fingers searched my back.
“Here.” He said.
“Here what?”
“Here,” and he leaned forward and kissed three points on my shoulder blade, “is orion’s belt.”
The Secret Life of Pandas 