[summary: "'The grief of hurting is its own burden,' she says, and she takes your hand and guides it under her shirt to her ribs. You trace the thick rope of skin there, and then she leans down and kisses you. It's your first kiss, this silent thing, and you don't think you've ever felt such sorrow before in someone else's body. The ache swallows your whole world in that moment, the longing—you kiss her back. Faberry Week: Scars.]

...

parallax (the skin a bit thicker than before, scars like train tracks)

.

we die. we die rich with lovers & tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we've entered & swum up like rivers. fears we've hidden in—like this wretched cave. i want all this marked on my body. where the real countries are. not boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men. i know you'll come carry me out to the Palace of Winds. that's what i've wanted: to walk in such a place with you. with friends, on an earth without maps.

—The English Patient

…

Sometimes you have nightmares of her funeral.

They're always gentle, these floating things, flashes full of grief like swallows: fleeting, quiet, lovely, gone. It's usually raining in these nightmares, this pretty mahogany casket being lowered into the ground. Judy is crying, and Quinn's sister is there, all of your friends, more people from school and church. They're mostly faceless, and you never bother to identify them.

Every time you are struck that Quinn isn't there, standing and blonde, this bright thing, until you remember that she is, but she's very, very still, ripped apart forever, in that pretty casket.

.

The nightmares start in high school, the night that was supposed to be your honeymoon. You jolt awake in the hospital, all hand sanitizer and stale, room temperature coffee, florescent lights and drawn shades. You're disoriented until you realize that no one has told you she's not dead yet.

.

Things progress: the stitches come out, black frays that hold together now-pink, now-smooth-rough skin. They're like poetry, which you do not understand but know has some breath anyhow. In a moment of weakness once after gym class—she's walking again, but today she hadn't really participated too much—she asks you to help her change after you see her sitting in the corner by her locker, head leaned back and eyes closed.

You see some of her scars in flashes You promise not to tell.

That's what you say: "I won't tell anyone." You whisper it into her skin while she gives you the most disquieting, gentle hug. You don't know what you mean, and maybe she doesn't either: you don't ever tell anyone about that moment, though, because perhaps in this moment your collective grief is unspeakable.

That night her funeral is silent.

.

She goes to Yale, voice breathy and low in the middle of the night in her dorm bed after you wake up. You don't cry.

"The grief of hurting is its own burden," she says, and she takes your hand and guides it under her shirt to her ribs. You trace the thick rope of skin there, and then she leans down and kisses you.

It's your first kiss, this silent thing, and you don't think you've ever felt such sorrow before in someone else's body. The ache swallows your whole world in that moment, the longing—you kiss her back.

.

Sometimes you get drunk and cry because you know Spencer is somewhere in New Haven, kissing Quinn's scars—the new ones that you've never learned as well as the ones you know so vividly, so hauntingly—with sated chardonnay on their breaths, Quinn's rose lipgloss.

You wonder if Quinn kisses with the same desperation now. You wonder if Spencer knows how to kiss her back.

You wonder if you ever actually did.

.

She tastes like coffee when you find her on campus one day, tears in your eyes because you haven't seen her in months, not since the summer, and one of your friends at NYADA had been in a mild accident that morning and you'd taken a train to New Haven immediately.

You've been talking again since summer, at first through sporadic email and now through text and sometimes on the phone.

Your nightmares haven't changed.

She's curled up in a chair in KTB Cafe, all long limbs and oversized sweatshirt, and sometimes you've forgotten how soft she could be.

She's alone, book tucked in her lap, held with her hands, glasses slipping down her nose. They're new, a lighter brown, flecked, and when she glances up when you sit down next to her, they're the same color as her widening eyes.

You reach out hesitantly, silently, and you know she's single and you know she's stable and you know she is full of such powerful ghosts, blooming in her chest—you will always wonder if this is, ineffably, part of the reason she has such trouble breathing, even though logically you know it's because of broken bones and split lungs.

Her skin is so brave, so smooth, when you touch her cheek. There are no scars there, and you look at her so seriously and she nods and then you kiss her. First—you kiss her first.

Maybe this is your first kiss. Maybe this is another declaration of grief.

Either way, she finds the little lump on the very inside of your lip from where you got hit by a baseball when you were six at recess and your teeth had pressed painfully into your gums.

She's not the only one with scars, and you're both still so young, so lovely—she tastes like coffee, and she kisses you back.

.

She gets her own apartment in New York—you don't even bother to protest because you get that she needs her own space, even though the rent is absurd—but you spend most nights together, rolling over with various nightmares, tracing various scars, clumsily and in the drifting quiet of early morning.

She wakes up so early one morning, gentle and thin, you think, so pretty in the lonely blue, and kisses you. She tastes like wine from the night before, and she breathes gently into your skin and says, "Come with me."

You wrap up in leggings and sweatshirts—it's spring, but the mornings are still chilly—and walk outside. It's just beginning to become day, all fleeting heals and drifts, and you sit on the stoop of her apartment, listen to the birds and the city groaning and singing to life.

You slip your hand under Quinn's sweatshirt as you lean your head on her shoulder and write I love you over and over again against her scars with the tip of your finger, press a soft kiss into her neck.

"You're some kind of wonder," she says, and sometimes you forget—most days now Quinn is bright, verbal, funny, so grown and so smart and so loving—that she was such a lonely child, that she's been through more pain in her twenty-three years than most people feel in their lives. Sometimes you forget that the cavities in her body are poems, that her marrow is thick, always, with grief.

"Baby," you say.

She shakes her head gently, and you brush some hair out of her eyes when she turns her head to look at you. "I believe in a certain type of cartography," she says, "like—you've mapped me, you know that? But it's not a map."

You want to cry, so you kiss her as gently as you can, and she sighs into your mouth, this small gift.

"Don't Anne Carson me now," you say, and she smiles brightly even as she rolls her eyes.

"The catastrophes of my skin are inscribed on your hands," she says.

"Quinn," you say. You dream of her funeral still, all of the flowers. You can smell them on her skin sometimes when you wake up—lavender and honeysuckle.

She kisses you again, briefly, without pretense, and then squeezes your hand. "I would kill for a hungover bagel and coffee right now."

You find yourself laughing, tugging her up with you and running inside to get your purse before you walk down the street to your favorite cafe. It's fleeting, the scars of time and violence on the city—construction here, cracks there.

But you know it then, finally, some requiem, some resolution, of grief: Quinn's hand, scarred palm and all, is tight in yours, and it is spring, and everything blooms through the cement, soft and brave, reaching and lovely, toward the sun.